Monthly Modulation in Dark Matter Direct-Detection Experiments
arXiv:1409.2858 · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2015/11/006
Abstract
The signals in dark matter direct-detection experiments should exhibit modulation signatures due to the Earth's motion with respect to the Galactic dark matter halo. The annual and daily modulations, due to the Earth's revolution about the Sun and rotation about its own axis, have been explored previously. Monthly modulation is another such feature present in direct detection signals, and provides a nearly model-independent method of distinguishing dark matter signal events from background. We study here monthly modulations in detail for both WIMP and WISP dark matter searches, examining both the effect of the motion of the Earth about the Earth-Moon barycenter and the gravitational focusing due to the Moon. For WIMP searches, we calculate the monthly modulation of the count rate and show the effects are too small to be observed in the foreseeable future. For WISP dark matter experiments, we show that the photons generated by WISP to photon conversion have frequencies which undergo a monthly modulating shift which is detectable with current technology and which cannot in general be neglected in high resolution WISP searches.
22 pages, 7 figures, added extensive discussion on WISP detection experiments
References in corpus (17)
- Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis
- First results from the LUX dark matter experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility
- Dark Matter Results from 225 Live Days of XENON100 Data
- The RAVE Survey: Constraining the Local Galactic Escape Speed
- Final model independent result of DAMA/LIBRA-phase1
- CDMSlite: A Search for Low-Mass WIMPs using Voltage-Assisted Calorimetric Ionization Detection in the SuperCDMS Experiment
- A High Resolution Search for Dark-Matter Axions
- Annual Modulation of Dark Matter in the Presence of Streams
- Diurnal modulation signal from dissipative hidden sector dark matter
- The Earth's velocity for direct detection experiments
- Daily Modulation as a Smoking Gun of Dark Matter with Significant Stopping
- Fitting the annual modulation in DAMA with neutrons from muons and neutrinos
- No role for neutrons, muons and solar neutrinos in the DAMA annual modulation results
- Phase-space distribution of unbound dark matter near the Sun
- One Model Explains DAMA/LIBRA, CoGENT, CDMS, and XENON
- Comment on "Fitting the annual modulation in DAMA with neutrons from muons and neutrinos''
- Design and Calibration of the 34 GHz Yale Microwave Cavity Experiment