2017/12/04 by M. Shafi Mahdawi, Mahdawi, M. Shafi, Glennys R. Farrar +1 · 1 citation
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Attenuation #Computational physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Energy (signal processing) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Mathematics #Monte Carlo method #Optics #Overburden #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scattering #Statistical physics #Statistics #astro-ph.HE #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1712.01170
arxiv created 2017/12/04 · openalex publication_date 2017/12/04 · arxiv updated 2017/12/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As experimental constraints on DM interactions become ever more sensitive and push into new regimes of DM mass, it becomes more and more challenging to accurately model the process by which Dark Matter particles lose energy through scattering in the Earth's surface or other overburdens. We show that a commonly-used approximation due to Starkman, Gould, Esmailzadeh and Dimopoulos (SGED) can fail badly in computing the attenuation, even while being useful for an order-of-magnitude estimate of the maximum cross section reach. We introduce a method of importance sampling which makes Monte-Carlo simulation of energy loss feasible, in spite of factor-107 or greater attenuation. We demonstrate the validity of our new method and expose multiple problems with the SGED approximation, this reveals interesting features of the energy loss process. We spot-check the recent Emken, Kouvaris and Shoemaker "5 Δv" prescription to place limits on cross sections based on a limited-statistics analysis, and find that an accurate simulation yields a factor of \rm4.4×106 and \rm2.4×104 larger number of events, for 50 MeV and 1 GeV DM mass respectively, than if the EKS 5 Δv prescription were valid.