Sub-GeV hadrophilic dark matter at neutrino detectors

Despite its success in explaining a wide range of phenomena, the Standard Model is unable to elucidate the nature of dark matter, that remains yet unknown, and is then considered to be incomplete. In this thesis we extensively investigate the parameter space for a light Sub-GeV hadrophilic candidate of dark matter that couples to the up-quark through a scalar mediator, exploring its phenomenology and the limits from literature for this candidate of dark matter. We study the production from air showers initiated by primary cosmic rays colliding with the atmosphere, obtaining the interactions with mesons through chiral perturbation theory. We consider the decay of the η meson both on-shell and off-shell, allowing us to increase the mass of the mediator freely, covering previously unexplored regions of the parameter space. By using Super-Kamiokande, Xenon-1T and KamLAND data we place the world leading limits on different regions of the parameter space, where we also derive sensitivities for JUNO, DUNE, Darwin and Hyper-Kamiokande. We show that neutrino detectors are particularly important in the detection of light dark matter with mediators with masses higher than ∼ 100 MeV while direct detection experiments (such as Xenon1T) are more effective when the mediator is lighter.