2011/12/31 by Juan Herrero-Garcia, Thomas Schwetz, Jure Zupan · 2 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Event (particle physics) #Halo #Modulation (music) #SIGNAL (programming language) #Set (abstract data type) #Symmetry (geometry) #Upper and lower bounds #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2012/03/005
discussion of CoGeNT surface event subtraction added, improved statistical analysis, version to appear in JCAP, 29 pages, 9 figures, 3 appendices
arxiv created 2012/02/14 · openalex publication_date 2012/03/05 · arxiv updated 2015/06/03 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We derive constraints on the annual modulation signal in Dark Matter (DM) direct detection experiments in terms of the unmodulated event rate. A general bound independent of the details of the DM distribution follows from the assumption that the motion of the earth around the sun is the only source of time variation. The bound is valid for a very general class of particle physics models and also holds in the presence of an unknown unmodulated background. More stringent bounds are obtained, if modest assumptions on symmetry properties of the DM halo are adopted. We illustrate the bounds by applying them to the annual modulation signals reported by the DAMA and CoGeNT experiments in the framework of spin-independent elastic scattering. While the DAMA signal satisfies our bounds, severe restrictions on the DM mass can be set for CoGeNT.