Jonathan H. Davis, Torsten Ensslin, Celine Boehm
Tremendous progress in the field of dark matter direct detection has allowed modern experiments to reach the sensitivity that is required to exclude large regions of parameter space. The strongest exclusion limit has been set by the XENON100 collaboration which has recently updated the constraint on the dark matter parameter space to an even greater degree. The method used by the collaboration to set this limit is based on a profile Likelihood analysis, which separates the experimental data into bands to better discriminate a potential dark matter nuclear-recoil signal from the electronic-recoil background. However the use of bands is not strictly necessary and tends to make the limit over-conservative. Here we propose an alternative method based on information theory and apply it to the 2011 data-set from the XENON100 experiment. We derive a new exclusion limit with this data which is both stronger than that derived by XENON100 with their profile Likelihood analysis using the same data, and competitive with the new limit which was derived using the recent 2012 data-set.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.1850
No comments:
Post a Comment