English

Towards One Tonne Direct WIMP Detectors: Have we got what it takes?

Astrophysics 2016-11-03 v1

Abstract

Experimentally have we got what it takes to pursue the direct observation of WIMP interactions down to sensitivities of a few events /100 kg/year? For a Ge target with a low energy threshold (<20 keVr) this corresponds to a WIMP-nucleon sigma~10^-46 cm^2. A number of recent theoretical papers, making calculations in SUSY-based frameworks, show many (>5) orders of magnitude spread in the possible interaction rates for models consistent with existing Cosmology and Accelerator bounds. Some theorists, but certainly not all, are able to generate models, that lead to interaction rates at the few /kg/day that would be implied by the current DAMA annual modulation signal. All theorists demonstrate models that generate much lower interaction rates. This paper takes an unashamed experimentalist`s view of the issues that arise when looking forward to constructing 1 tonne WIMP detectors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0106200,
  title  = {Towards One Tonne Direct WIMP Detectors: Have we got what it takes?},
  author = {R. J. Gaitskell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0106200},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

12 pages (TeX), 6 figures (eps); IDM2000 3rd International Workshop on the Identification of Dark Matter, York, UK, to be published in proceedings Eds. N. J. C. Spooner and V. Kudryavtsev, World Scientific, Singapore, 2001. Slides available at http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~gaitskel