Annual modulation of dark matter in the presence of streams

By C. Savage, K. Freese, P. Gondolo. 2006

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In addition to a smooth component of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter in galaxies, there may be streams of material; the effects of WIMP streams on direct detection experiments is examined in this paper. The contribution to the count rate due to the stream cuts off at some characteristic energy. Near this cutoff energy, the stream contribution to the annual modulation of recoils in the detector is comparable to that of the thermalized halo, even if the stream represents only a small portion ({approx}5% or less) of the local halo density. Consequently the total modulation may be quite different than would be expected for the standard halo model alone: it may not be cosinelike and can peak at a different date than expected. The effects of speed, direction, density, and velocity dispersion of a stream on the modulation are examined. We describe how the observation of a modulation can be used to determine these stream parameters. Alternatively, the presence of a dropoff in the recoil spectrum can be used to determine the WIMP mass if the stream speed is known. The annual modulation of the cutoff energy together with the annual modulation of the overall signal provide amore » 'smoking gun' for WIMP detection.« less

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/360d0e71fa7a5698ae47c62d75eb80b0adb85a9d

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Citations in the corpus

Dark matter direct detection signals inferred from a cosmological N-body simulation with baryons (2009, background): “The consequences for direct detection of some of these departures from the standard halo case have been analyzed by several authors [53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60].”
Revealing the dark matter halo with axion direct detection (2017, unknown): “[66,68,69] and model the stream as a boosted Maxwellian distribution with a narrow velocity dispersion of v0 1⁄4 10 km=s and a stream velocity of vstr 1⁄4 ð0; 93.”
Colloquium: Annual modulation of dark matter (2013, background): “For a complete discussion of the modulation spectra for dark matter streams, see Savage, Freese, and Gondolo (2006).”
Dark matter direct detection with non-Maxwellian velocity structure (2009, methodology): “Another potentially interesting signature of velocity space structure is the shift in the peak day of the annual modulation, as was explored in [22].”
Direct dark matter detection: the next decade (2012, background): “∆E becomes negative at small recoil energies, meaning that the differential event rates peaks in winter for small recoil energies, and in summer for larger recoils energies [26].”