Searching for Dark Matter Signals COHERENT Way

While there are many pieces of gravity-based evidence that dark matter exists in the universe, no experiments, mostly for searching for dark matter candidates of weak-scale mass, have made any conclusive observations through non-gravitational coupling of dark matter to Standard Model particles. In light of this situation, dark matter candidates of other mass scales have received increasing attention. In particular, MeV -- sub-GeV dark matter is well motivated as it can be produced thermally while being less constrained by current experimental searches. I will discuss the COHERENT experiment as a possible way to search for such dark matter. Events induced by the Standard Model neutrinos are major backgrounds. I will argue that the combined cuts in the timing and recoil energy spectra of events can be useful vetoing such backgrounds while keeping a large fraction of dark matter signal events. I then analyze the existing CsI detector data of COHERENT and show a mild excess in the timing distribution which can be explained by such dark matter. I compare the sensitivity to the kinetic mixing parameter for current and future COHERENT experiments with the projected limits from various other experiments.