Aberration features in directional dark matter detection

Abstract

The motion of the Earth around the Sun causes an annual change in the magnitude and direction of the arrival velocity of dark matter particles on Earth, in a way analogous to aberration of stellar light. In directional detectors, aberration of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) modulates the pattern of nuclear recoil directions in a way that depends on the orbital velocity of the Earth and the local galactic distribution of WIMP velocities. Knowing the former, WIMP aberration can give information on the latter, besides being a curious way of confirming the revolution of the Earth and the extraterrestrial provenance of WIMPs. While observing the full aberration pattern requires extremely large exposures, we claim that the annual variation of the mean recoil direction or of the event counts over specific solid angles may be detectable with moderately large exposures. For example, integrated counts over Galactic hemispheres separated by planes perpendicular to Earth's orbit would modulate annually, resulting in Galactic Hemisphere Annual Modulations (GHAM) with amplitudes larger than the usual non-directional annual modulation.

24 pages, 46 figures, addition of new section 7 on anisotropic models and Fig. 15

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• Update on Light WIMP Limits: LUX, lite and Light
• Dark Matter Candidates and Searches
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• Light weakly interacting massive particles
• TASI 2014 Lectures: The Hunt for Dark Matter
• The Galactic One-Way Shapiro Delay to PSR B1937+21
• Earth's Stopping Effect in Directional Dark Matter Detectors
• Gravitational Focusing and Substructure Effects on the Rate Modulation in Direct Dark Matter Searches
• Simulations of the 3-Dimensional Velocity Distribution of Halo Weakly Interacting Massive Particles for Directional Dark Matter Detection Experiments
• Dark Matter Directionality Revisited with a High Pressure Xenon Gas Detector