ELKO fermionic fields are prime candidates to describe dark matter, due to their intrinsic neutral nature, as they are constructed as eigenstates of the charge conjugation operator with dual helicity. To formulate the meaning of the darkness, the ELKO-photon coupling is scrutinized with a Pauli-like interaction, and the path integral is then formulated from the phase space constraint structure. Ward-Takahashi-like identities and Schwinger-Dyson equations, together with renormalizability, are employed to investigate a phenomenological mechanism to avoid external light signals. Accordingly, the non-polarized pair annihilation and Compton-like processes are shown to vanish at the limit of small scattering angles even if considering 1-loop radiative corrections, reinforcing the ELKO dark matter interpretation.However, ELKO interactions with nucleons are still possible. Motivated by recent nucleonrecoil experiments to detect dark matter, we furnish a consistent theoretical setup to describe ELKO-photon interaction compatible with the prevalence of darkness.

Mass dimension one quantum fields, constructed upon eigenspinors of the charge conjugation operator with dual helicity (ELKO), are prime candidates to describe dark matter.Their interaction with the photon and the proton, in scattering processes, are here explored and discussed, using both the standard QFT with a Maxwell gauge field and a generalized QFT also involving a Podolsky gauge sector. Renormalization and radiative corrections are analyzed in the ELKO setup, in the context of a generalized spinor dual and the twisted conjugation, both yielding unitarity. Several applications are scrutinized, involving the inherent darkness underlying ELKO construction and galaxies rotation curves, the non-relativistic potential regime, and the Møller-like scattering involving ELKO. I. INTRODUCTION Quantum fields constructed upon mass dimension one quantum spinor fields in QFT are prime candidates to describe dark matter, since they are, by construction, neutral fermions under gauge interactions, therefore implementing darkness [1-3]. Neutrality under gauge fields is naturally implemented when one employs eigenspinors of the charge conjugation operator. Additionally demanding that the right-and left-handed components of these spinor fields have dual helicity, the so-called eigenspinors of the charge conjugation operator with dual helicity (ELKO) set in. Despite its inherent darkness, eventual couplings remain and might lead to peculiar experimental signatures of ELKO in high-energy running experiments [4-14]. ELKO resides in non-standard Wigner spinor classes, when the unitary irreducible representations of the Poincaré group are extended to encode discrete symmetries [15-19]. Field-theoretical developments and applications of mass dimension one quantum fields were presented in Refs. [20-52]. In addition, fermionic aspects of AdS/CFT correspondence, emulating mass dimension one quantum fields, have been introduced in Refs. [53-58], whereas the pivotal role of ELKO in the membrane paradigm was investigated in Refs. [59-65].

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