2009/06/30 by Douglas P. Finkbeiner, Tongyan Lin, Neal Weiner · 68 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Particle Detector Development and Performance #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.IM #hep-ex
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.80.115008
published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 80(11) (American Physical Society) · 12 pages, 9 Figures. v2: minor changes, journal version
openalex publication_date 2009/12/15 · arxiv created 2010/09/13 · arxiv updated 2010/09/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The DAMA/LIBRA Collaboration has detected an annual modulation of the recoil rate in NaI crystals with the phase expected for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) scattering events. This signal is dramatically inconsistent with upper limits from other experiments for elastically scattering weak-scale WIMPs. However, the results are compatible for the case of inelastic dark matter (iDM). The iDM theory, as implemented by Tucker-Smith and Weiner, constrains the WIMP to a tight contour in \ensuremathσn\ensuremath-\ensuremathδ space, where \ensuremathδ is the mass difference between the ground state and excited WIMPs. An urgent priority in direct detection is to test this scenario. The crucial test of the iDM explanation of DAMA---an experimentum crucis---is an experiment with directional sensitivity, which can measure the daily modulation in direction. Because the contrast can be 100%, it is a sharper test than the much smaller annual modulation in the rate. We estimate the significance of such an experiment as a function of the WIMP mass, cross section, background rate, and other parameters. The proposed experiment severely constrains the DAMA/iDM scenario even with modest exposure (\ensuremath∼1000 kg\ifmmode⋅\else\textperiodcentered\fiday) on gaseous xenon.