Harmonics in the Dark-Matter Sky: Directional Detection in the Fourier-Bessel Basis

Abstract

Details about the velocity distribution of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter in our galaxy may be revealed by nuclear-recoil detectors with directional sensitivity. Previous studies have assumed that the velocity distribution takes a simple functional form characterized by a small number of parameters. More recent work has shown that basis-function expansions may allow for more general parameterization; such an approach has been considered for both the one-dimensional speed and momentum distributions, and also for three-dimensional velocity distributions obeying certain equilibrium conditions. In this work, I extend this basis-function approach to allow for arbitrary velocity distributions by working in the Fourier-Bessel basis, deriving an analytic expression for the directional recoil spectrum. Such an approach is completely general, and may be useful if the velocity distribution is too complex to be characterized by simple functional forms or is not completely virialized. Results concerning the three-dimensional Radon transform of the Fourier-Bessel basis functions may be of general interest for tomographic applications.

14 pages, 1 figure

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• A review of the discovery reach of directional Dark Matter detection
• Readout technologies for directional WIMP Dark Matter detection
• Dark matter astrophysical uncertainties and the neutrino floor
• Reconstructing the three-dimensional local dark matter velocity distribution
• Impact of galactic distributions in celestial capture of dark matter
• Halo uncertainties in electron recoil events at direct detection experiments
• Discretising the velocity distribution for directional dark matter experiments
• Comparing readout strategies to directly detect dark matter
• Wavelet-Harmonic Integration Methods
• Partial Rate Matrix for Dark Matter Scattering