COSINUS is a dark matter direct detection experiment using NaI crystals as cryogenic scintillating calorimeters. If no signal is observed, this will constrain the dark matter scattering rate in sodium iodide. We investigate how this constraint can be used to infer that the annual modulation signal observed in the DAMA/LIBRA experiment cannot originate from dark matter nuclear recoil events, independently of the dark matter model. We achieve this by unfolding the DAMA modulation spectrum to obtain the implied unquenched nuclear recoil spectrum, which we then compare to the expected COSINUS sensitivity. We find that assuming zero background in the signal region, a 1σ, 2σ or 3σ confidence limit exclusion can be obtained with 57, 130 or 250 kg day of exposure, respectively. A simple background model indicates that in the presence of background, the exposure requirements may increase by ∼30%.
@article{arxiv.2504.18263,
title = {COSINUS model-independent sensitivity to the DAMA/LIBRA dark matter signal},
author = {G. Angloher and M. R. Bharadwaj and A. Böhmer and M. Cababie and I. Colantoni and I. Dafinei and N. Di Marco and C. Dittmar and L. Einfalt and F. Ferella and F. Ferroni and S. Fichtinger and A. Filipponi and T. Frank and M. Friedl and Z. Ge and M. Heikinheimo and M. N. Hughes and K. Huitu and M. Kellermann and R. Maji and M. Mancuso and L. Pagnanini and F. Petricca and S. Pirro and F. Pröbst and G. Profeta and A. Puiu and F. Reindl and K. Schäffner and J. Schieck and P. Schreiner and C. Schwertner and K. Shera and M. Stahlberg and A. Stendahl and M. Stukel and C. Tresca and F. Wagner and S. Yue and V. Zema and Y. Zhu and The COSINUS Collaboration},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18263},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
11 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; v2 matches the published version