Readout strategies for directional dark matter detection beyond the neutrino background
Name
PhysRevD.92.063518.pdf
Size
1.22 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
29c176d1d117657ac6452407272dab4f
Author(s)
O’Hare, Ciaran A. J.
Green, Anne M.
Billard, Julien
Figueroa-Feliciano, Enectali
Strigari, Louis E.
Date Issued
September 2015
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
O’Hare, Ciaran A. J., Anne M. Green, Julien Billard, Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano, and Louis E. Strigari. "Readout strategies for directional dark matter detection beyond the neutrino background." Phys. Rev. D 92, 063518 (September 2015). © 2015 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) by direct detection faces an encroaching background due to coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering. As the sensitivity of these experiments improves, the question of how to best distinguish a dark matter signal from neutrinos will become increasingly important. A proposed method of overcoming this so-called “neutrino floor” is to utilize the directional signature that both neutrino- and dark-matter-induced recoils possess. We show that directional experiments can indeed probe WIMP-nucleon cross sections below the neutrino floor with little loss in sensitivity due to the neutrino background. In particular we find at low WIMP masses (around 6 GeV) the discovery limits for directional detectors penetrate below the nondirectional limit by several orders of magnitude. For high WIMP masses (around 100 GeV), the nondirectional limit is overcome by a factor of a few. Furthermore we show that even for directional detectors which can only measure one- or two-dimensional projections of the three-dimensional recoil track, the discovery potential is only reduced by a factor of 3 at most. We also demonstrate that while the experimental limitations of directional detectors, such as sense recognition and finite angular resolution, have a detrimental effect on the discovery limits, it is still possible to overcome the ultimate neutrino background faced by nondirectional detectors.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.92.063518
