Quantifying (dis)agreement between direct detection experiments in a halo-independent way

Abstract

We propose an improved method to study recent and near-future dark matter direct detection experiments with small numbers of observed events. Our method determines in a quantitative and halo-independent way whether the experiments point towards a consistent dark matter signal and identifies the best-fit dark matter parameters. To achieve true halo independence, we apply a recently developed method based on finding the velocity distribution that best describes a given set of data. For a quantitative global analysis we construct a likelihood function suitable for small numbers of events, which allows us to determine the best-fit particle physics properties of dark matter considering all experiments simultaneously. Based on this likelihood function we propose a new test statistic that quantifies how well the proposed model fits the data and how large the tension between different direct detection experiments is. We perform Monte Carlo simulations in order to determine the probability distribution function of this test statistic and to calculate the p-value for both the dark matter hypothesis and the background-only hypothesis.

23 pages, 14 figures. v2: matches published version

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• A taste of dark matter: Flavour constraints on pseudoscalar mediators
• On the Direct Detection of Dark Matter Annihilation
• What is the probability that direct detection experiments have observed Dark Matter?
• The Past and Future of Light Dark Matter Direct Detection
• Discretising the velocity distribution for directional dark matter experiments
• A halo-independent lower bound on the dark matter capture rate in the Sun from a direct detection signal
• Halo-Independent analysis of direct dark matter detection data for any WIMP interaction