Results on Low-Mass Weakly Interacting Massive Particles from an 11 kg-day Target Exposure of DAMIC at SNOLAB

Abstract

We present constraints on the existence of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) from an 11 kg-day target exposure of the DAMIC experiment at the SNOLAB underground laboratory. The observed energy spectrum and spatial distribution of ionization events with electron-equivalent energies $>$200 eV${}_{\mathrm{ee}}$ in the DAMIC CCDs are consistent with backgrounds from natural radioactivity. An excess of ionization events is observed above the analysis threshold of 50 eV${}_{\mathrm{ee}}$. While the origin of this low-energy excess requires further investigation, our data exclude spin-independent WIMP-nucleon scattering cross sections ${\sigma }_{\chi -n}$ as low as $3\times 10^{-41}$ cm${}^2$ for WIMPs with masses $m_{\chi }$ from 7 to 10 GeV$c^{-2}$ . These results are the strongest constraints from a silicon target on the existence of WIMPs with $m_{\chi }$$<$9 GeV$c^{-2}$ and are directly relevant to any dark matter interpretation of the excess of nuclear-recoil events observed by the CDMS silicon experiment in 2013.

arXiv comment6 pages, 4 figures

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