2020/04/30 by Bradley J. Kavanagh, Timón Emken, Timon Emken +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Computational physics #Computer science #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Nuclear physics #Particle Detector Development and Performance #Physics #Proton #SIGNAL (programming language) #Universe #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.104.083023
published as Phys. Rev. D 104, 083023 (2021) · 6 pages, 3 figures. Monte Carlo and likelihood codes available at https://github.com/temken/DaMaSCUS/tree/v1.1 and https://github.com/bradkav/EarthScatterLikelihood respectively. v2: Updated with new benchmarks and improved analysis of detector resolution (widening uncertainties on the local density). Matches version published in PRD
openalex publication_date 2021/10/19 · arxiv created 2021/12/22 · arxiv updated 2021/12/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Despite strong evidence for the existence of large amounts of dark matter (DM) in our Universe, there is no direct indication of its presence in our own solar system. All estimates of the local DM density rely on extrapolating results on much larger scales. We demonstrate for the first time the possibility of simultaneously measuring the local DM density and interaction cross section with a direct detection experiment. It relies on the assumption that incoming DM particles frequently scatter on terrestrial nuclei prior to detection, inducing an additional time-dependence of the signal. We show that for sub-GeV DM, with a large spin-independent DM-proton cross section, future direct detection experiments should be able to reconstruct the local DM density with smaller than 50% uncertainty.