Spin-independent elastic WIMP scattering and the DAMA annual modulation signal

By M. Fairbairn, T. Schwetz. 2008

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We discuss the interpretation of the annual modulation signal seen in the DAMA experiment in terms of spin-independent elastic WIMP scattering. Taking into account channeling in the crystal as well as the spectral signature of the modulation signal we find that the low-mass WIMP region consistent with DAMA data is confined to WIMP masses close to m� ≃ 12GeV, in disagreement with the constraints from CDMS and XENON. We conclude that even if channeling is taken into account this interpretation of the DAMA modulation signal is disfavoured. There are no overlap regions in the parameter space at 90% CL and a consistency test gives the probability of 1.2 ×10 −5 . We study the robustness of this result with respect to variations of the WIMP velocity distribution in our galaxy, by changing various parameters of the distribution function, and by using the results of a realistic N-body dark matter simulation. We find that only by making rather extreme assumptions regarding halo properties can we obtain agreement between DAMA and CDMS/XENON.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6622e6bfd184fa18936f296e1db60c081dcc2d1

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Citations in the corpus

Abelian hidden sectors at a GeV (2009, background): “This can potentially be explained by the elastic scattering of GeV-mass dark matter states [26–31], or by heavier inelastic dark matter whose inelastic splittings and scattering cross-section emerge naturally through its coupling to new GeV-mass states [12, 32–35].”
Colloquium: Annual modulation of dark matter (2013, background): “The compatibility may change for, e.g., a different WIMP-nucleus effective operator or for additional substructure contributions (Fairbairn and Schwetz, 2009; Farina et al., 2011; Fornengo, Panci, and Regis, 2011; Frandsen et al., 2011; Schwetz and Zupan, 2011; Arina et al., 2012).”
Light scalar WIMP through the Higgs portal and CoGeNT (2010, background): “2A major problem with such an interpretation is that the unmodulated rate must be also large, which implies that the background must be anomalously low in the region of recoil energies where the signal is observed by DAMA, see for instance [4].”
Dark matter direct detection with non-Maxwellian velocity structure (2009, methodology): “We fit these distributions with functions like the ones in Fairbairn & Schwetz (2009) [24], except that”
Dark matter direct detection signals inferred from a cosmological N-body simulation with baryons (2009, methodology): “As opposed to previous works [43, 60], here the regions in the parameter space are obtained directly from the velocity distributions extracted from the simulation data, without modeling.”
Global interpretation of direct Dark Matter searches after CDMS-II results (2009, methodology): “Let us note that for the DAMA region around 10 GeV without channeling additional contraints from CDMS data on silicon apply (not shown) [11].”