Directional Dark Matter Detection Beyond the Neutrino Bound
Abstract
Coherent scattering of solar, atmospheric and diffuse supernovae neutrinos creates an irreducible background for direct dark matter experiments with sensitivities to WIMP-nucleon spin-independent scattering cross-sections of 10^(-46)-10^(-48) cm^2, depending on the WIMP mass. Even if one could eliminate all other backgrounds, this "neutrino floor" will limit future experiments with projected sensitivities to cross-sections as small as 10^(-48) cm^2. Direction-sensitive detectors have the potential to study dark matter beyond the neutrino bound by fitting event distributions in multiple dimensions: recoil kinetic energy, recoil track angle with respect to the sun, and event time. This work quantitatively explores the impact of direction-sensitivity on the neutrino bound in dark matter direct detection.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1406.5047,
title = {Directional Dark Matter Detection Beyond the Neutrino Bound},
author = {Philipp Grothaus and Malcolm Fairbairn and Jocelyn Monroe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.5047},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
matches the published version, figure 4 updated plus extended discussion about neutrino flux uncertainties and detector resolutions, 13 pages, 11 figures