Present status of IGEX dark matter search at Canfranc Underground Laboratory

Abstract

One IGEX 76Ge double-beta decay detector is currently operating in the Canfranc Underground Laboratory in a search for dark matter WIMPs, through the Ge nuclear recoil produced by the WIMP elastic scattering. A new exclusion plot has been derived for WIMP-nucleon spin-independent interactions. To obtain this result, 40 days of data from the IGEX detector (energy threshold 4 keV), recently collected, have been analyzed. These data improve the exclusion limits derived from all the other ionization germanium detectors in the mass region from 20 GeV to 200 GeV, where a WIMP supposedly responsible for the annual modulation effect reported by the DAMA experiment would be located. The new IGEX exclusion contour enters, by the first time, the DAMA region by using only raw data, with no background discrimination, and excludes its upper left part. It is also shown that with a moderate improvement of the detector performances, the DAMA region could be fully explored.

arXiv comment3 pages, 3 figures, talk delivered at the 7th International Workshop on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP 2001), September 2001, Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy (to appear in the Conference Proceedings, Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.))

References in corpus (6)

• Exclusion Limits on the WIMP-Nucleon Cross-Section from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search
• First Results of the EDELWEISS WIMP Search using a 320 g Heat-and-Ionization Ge Detector
• New limits on dark--matter WIMPs from the Heidelberg--Moscow experiment
• New constraints on WIMPs from the Canfranc IGEX dark matter search
• Sensitivity plots for WIMP direct detection using the annual modulation signature
• Direct Detection of WIMP Dark Matter

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Alternative Approaches to Dark Matter Puzzle