Inelastic Dark Matter in Light of DAMA/LIBRA

By Spencer Chang, G. Kribs, David Tucker-Smith, N. Weiner. 2008

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Inelastic dark matter, in which weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP)-nucleus scatterings occur through a transition to an excited WIMP state {approx}100 keV above the ground state, provides a compelling explanation of the DAMA annual modulation signal. We demonstrate that the relative sensitivities of various dark matter direct detection experiments are modified such that the DAMA annual modulation signal can be reconciled with the absence of a reported signal at CDMS-Soudan, XENON10, ZEPLIN, CRESST, and KIMS for inelastic WIMPs with masses O(100 GeV). We review the status of these experiments, and make predictions for upcoming ones. In particular, we note that inelastic dark matter leads to highly suppressed signals at low energy, with most events typically occurring between 20 and 45 keV (unquenched) at xenon and iodine experiments, and generally no events at low ({approx}10 keV) energies. Suppressing the background in this high-energy region is essential to testing this scenario. The recent CRESST data suggest seven observed tungsten events, which is consistent with expectations from this model. If the tungsten signal persists at future CRESST runs, it would provide compelling evidence for inelastic dark matter, while its absence should exclude it.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7a8d06770da68d1388f943eee0559e77be6ae74

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Citations in the corpus

Global interpretation of direct Dark Matter searches after CDMS-II results (2009, unknown): “[21–26].”
Non-abelian dark sectors and their collider signatures (2009, unknown): “ATIC [2] detects an abundance of cosmic ray electrons between 300 − 800 GeV, while PAMELA [3] sees an excess of positrons (but not anti-protons [4]) at 10-100 GeV.”
Dark matter direct detection with non-Maxwellian velocity structure (2009, methodology): “Recent studies [27, 25, 41, 42] have shown that iDM remains a viable explanation of the DAMA data, consistent with recent results from CDMS [43], XENON10 [44], KIMS [45], ZEPLIN II [46], ZEPLIN III [47] and CRESST [48].”
Non-relativistic effective theory of dark matter direct detection (2010, background): “J C A P 1 1 ( 2 0 1 0 ) 0 4 2 out in the context of inelastic DM [1, 2] and form factor DM [3, 4].”
Abelian hidden sectors at a GeV (2009, background): “This requires an inelastic mass splitting on the order of 100 keV and an effective nucleon scattering cross-section in the range σn ∼ ( 10−40 − 10−38 ) cm2, assuming a single dominant dark matter component [12, 32–35, 81].”