Accelerating Earth-Bound Dark Matter
  A fraction of the dark matter may consist of a particle species that
interacts much more strongly with the Standard Model than a typical weakly
interacting massive particle (WIMP) of similar mass. Such a strongly
interacting dark matter component could have avoided detection in searches for
WIMP-like dark matter through its interactions with the material in the
atmosphere and the Earth that slow it down significantly before reaching
detectors underground. These same interactions can also enhance the density of
a strongly interacting dark matter species near the Earth's surface to well
above the local galactic dark matter density. In this work we propose two new
methods of detecting strongly interacting dark matter based on accelerating the
enhanced population expected in the Earth through scattering. The first
approach is to use underground nuclear accelerator beams to upscatter the
ambient dark matter population into a WIMP-style detector located downstream.
In the second technique, dark matter is upscattered with an intense thermal
source and detected with a low-threshold dark matter detector. We also discuss
potential candidates for strongly interacting dark matter and we show that the
scenario can be naturally realized with a hidden fermion coupled to a sub-GeV
dark photon.
