A review of the discovery reach of directional Dark Matter detection

By F. Mayet, A. Green, J. Battat, J. Billard, Nassim Bozorgnia, G. Gelmini, P. Gondolo, B. Kavanagh, Samuel K. Lee, D. Loomba and 6 more. 2016

233 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cosmological observations indicate that most of the matter in the Universe is Dark Matter. Dark Matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) can be detected directly, via its elastic scattering off target nuclei. Most current direct detection experiments only measure the energy of the recoiling nuclei. However, directional detection experiments are sensitive to the direction of the nuclear recoil as well. Due to the Sun’s motion with respect to the Galactic rest frame, the directional recoil rate has a dipole feature, peaking around the direction of the Solar motion. This provides a powerful tool for demonstrating the Galactic origin of nuclear recoils and hence unambiguously detecting Dark Matter. Furthermore, the directional recoil distribution depends on the WIMP mass, scattering cross section and local velocity distribution. Therefore, with a large number of recoil events it will be possible to study the physics of Dark Matter in terms of particle and astrophysical properties. We review the potential of directional detectors for detecting and characterizing WIMPs.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a6388799687623555428774c633da652444dee2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Y. Hochberg
2. M. Lisanti
3. K. Zurek
4. Y. Kahn
5. E. Vitagliano
6. C. O’Hare
7. A. Millar
8. A. Caputo

Citations in the corpus

• Dark matter direct-detection experiments (2015, unknown): “technology for directional dark matter searches [366][367][368].”
• Directional detection of dark matter with two-dimensional targets (2016, background): “This setup is reminiscent of a time-projection chamber (TPC), which is the technology of choice for current directional detectors [32].”
• WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “14 Another important example of detection technique that focuses on ionization signal from DM-nuclei scatterings is used in gaseous detectors employed in directional dark matter searches (for review see [156]).”
• Dark photon limits: A handbook (2021, background): “[188] for the full rotation matrices needed to”