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Isospin violating dark matter in Stückelberg portal scenarios

Hidden sector scenarios in which dark matter (DM) interacts with the Standard Model matter fields through the exchange of massive Z' bosons are well motivated by certain string theory constructions. In this work, we thoroughly study the phenomenological aspects of such scenarios and find that they present a clear and testable consequence for direct DM searches. We show that such string motivated Stückelberg portals naturally lead to isospin violating interactions of DM particles with nuclei. We find that the relations between the DM coupling to neutrons and protons for both, spin-independent (fn/fp) and spin-dependent (an/ap) interactions, are very flexible depending on the charges of the quarks under the extra U(1) gauge groups. We show that within this construction these ratios are generically different from plus and minus 1 (i.e. different couplings to protons and neutrons) leading to a potentially measurable distinction from other popular portals. Finally, we incorporate bounds from searches for dijet and dilepton resonances at the LHC as well as LUX bounds on the elastic scattering of DM off nucleons to determine the experimentally allowed values of fn/fp and an/ap.