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GeV WIMPs scattering off of OH impurities cannot explain the DAMA signal

2014/01/31 by Stefano Profumo, Farinaldo S. Queiroz · 8 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Hydrogen #Impurity #Particle Detector Development and Performance #SIGNAL (programming language) #Scattering #WIMP #Weakly interacting massive particles #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2014/05/038

published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2014(05), 038 (Institute of Physics) · 5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in JCAP

arxiv created 2014/05/05 · openalex publication_date 2014/05/27 · arxiv updated 2015/06/18 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

In the presence of OH impurities in the DAMA crystals, GeV-scale WIMPs elastically scattering off of hydrogen nuclei with a spin independent cross section of ∼10 −33 cm 2 might explain the annual modulation observed by the DAMA experiment, while being consistent with other direct dark matter searches, as scattering would occur at energies below the energy threshold of other detectors. In this work we examine this possibility and show that, independent of the level of OH impurities in the DAMA crystals, for several reasons this scenario does not provide a viable explanation to the DAMA signal.

Citations