Direct detection of leptophilic dark matter in a model with radiative neutrino masses

Abstract

We consider an electroweak scale model for dark matter (DM) and radiative neutrino mass generation. Despite the leptophilic nature of DM with no direct couplings to quarks and gluons, scattering with nuclei is induced at the 1-loop level through photon exchange. Effectively, there are charge-charge, dipole-charge, and dipole-dipole interactions. We investigate the parameter space consistent with constraints from neutrino masses and mixing, charged lepton-flavor violation, perturbativity, and the thermal production of the correct DM abundance, and calculate the expected event rate in DM direct detection experiments. We show that current data from XENON100 start to constrain certain regions of the allowed parameter space, whereas future data from XENON1T has the potential to significantly probe the model.