2011/03/02 by Chung-Lin Shan, Shan, Chung-Lin
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph.HE #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1103.0481
29 pages, 20 eps figures; v2: typos fixed, references added and updated, revised version
openalex publication_date 2011/03/02 · arxiv created 2011/08/16 · arxiv updated 2011/08/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. For understanding the nature of WIMPs and identifying them among new particles produced at colliders (hopefully in the near future), determinations of their mass and couplings on nucleons from direct Dark Matter detection experiments are essential. Based on our model-independent method for determining the WIMP mass from experimental data, I present a way to also estimate the spin-independent (SI) WIMP-nucleon coupling by using measured recoil energies directly. This method is independent of the velocity distribution of halo WIMPs as well as (practically) of the as yet unknown WIMP mass. In a background-free environment, for a WIMP mass of ~ 100 GeV the SI WIMP-nucleon coupling could in principle be estimated with an uncertainty of ~ 15% by using 2 (or 3) x 50 events from experiments.