Comments on "First Dark Matter Results from the XENON100 Experiment"
Abstract
The XENON100 collaboration has recently released new dark matter limits, placing particular emphasis on their impact on searches known to be sensitive to light-mass (below 10 GeV/c^2) Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), such as DAMA and CoGeNT. We describe here several sources of uncertainty and bias in their analysis that make their new claimed sensitivity presently untenable. In particular, we point out additional work in this field and simple kinematic arguments that indicate that liquid xenon (LXe) may be a relatively insensitive detection medium for the recoil energies (few keV_r) expected from such low mass WIMPs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1005.0838,
title = {Comments on "First Dark Matter Results from the XENON100 Experiment"},
author = {J. I. Collar and D. N. McKinsey},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.0838},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
v3: Figures and appendix added showing the effect of choice of Leff on claimed sensitivity. v2:Important information added to a footnote. Figures enlarged, references fixed