English

Can dark matter - electron scattering explain the DAMA annual modulation consistent with XENON100 constraints?

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2016-07-01 v3 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

For many years annually modulating \sim keV scintillations have been observed in the DAMA/NaI and DAMA/Libra experiments. A dark matter - electron scattering interpretation is now favoured given the stringent constraints on nuclear recoil rates obtained by LUX, SuperCDMS and other experiments. Very recently, the XENON100 experiment has observed a modest annual modulation in their electron recoil events (2.8 σ\sigma C.L.) with phase consistent with that of the DAMA experiments. However, they also found a stringent upper limit on the unmodulated rate, which suggests that any dark matter - electron scattering interpretation of these annual modulations must involve a large modulation fraction >50%\stackrel{>}{\sim} 50\%. Here we discuss the extent to which these results might be able to be accommodated within multi-component dark matter models featuring light dark matter particles of mass \sim MeV, focusing on the mirror dark matter case for definiteness. The importance of diurnal variation as a means of testing these kinds of models is also discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1508.07402,
  title  = {Can dark matter - electron scattering explain the DAMA annual modulation consistent with XENON100 constraints?},
  author = {R. Foot},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.07402},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

This paper used an oversimplified description of a complex problem which is unlikely to be very useful. A better description is given in 1512.06471, which supersedes this paper