Thursday, December 8, 2011

1112.1627 (Juan Herrero-Garcia et al.)

On the annual modulation signal in dark matter direct detection    [PDF]

Juan Herrero-Garcia, Thomas Schwetz, Jure Zupan
We derive constraints on the annual modulation signal in Dark Matter (DM) direct detection experiments in terms of the unmodulated event rate. A general bound independent of the details of DM distribution follows from the assumption that the motion of the earth around the sun is the only source of time variation. The bound is valid for a very general class of particle physics models and also holds in the presence of an unknown unmodulated background. More stringent bounds are obtained, if modest assumptions on symmetry properties of the DM halo are adopted. We illustrate the bounds by applying them to the annual modulation signals reported by the DAMA and CoGeNT experiments in the framework of spin-independent elastic scattering. While the DAMA signal satisfies our bounds, severe restrictions on the DM mass can be set for CoGeNT.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.1627

No comments:

Post a Comment