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.

matches the published version, figure 4 updated plus extended discussion about neutrino flux uncertainties and detector resolutions, 13 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Dark Matter Results from 225 Live Days of XENON100 Data
• The Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background
• Measurement of the atmospheric neutrino energy spectrum from 100 GeV to 400 TeV with IceCube
• Improvement of low energy atmospheric neutrino flux calculation using the JAM nuclear interaction model
• Neutrino Backgrounds to Dark Matter Searches
• Solar and Atmospheric Neutrinos: Background Sources for the Direct Dark Matter Searches
• First Dark Matter Search Results from a Surface Run of the 10-L DMTPC Directional Dark Matter Detector
• Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis to constrain Dark Matter properties with directional detection
• Exclusion limits from data of directional Dark Matter detectors
• Probing the Local Velocity Distribution of WIMP Dark Matter with Directional Detectors

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Complementarity of dark matter detectors in light of the neutrino background
• Characterising dark matter searches at colliders and direct detection experiments: Vector mediators
• Dark Matter vs. Neutrinos: The effect of astrophysical uncertainties and timing information on the neutrino floor
• The Past and Future of Light Dark Matter Direct Detection
• Discretising the velocity distribution for directional dark matter experiments
• Comparing readout strategies to directly detect dark matter
• Modified Supersymmetric Dark Sectors