Improvement of the Determination of the WIMP Mass from Direct Dark Matter Detection Data

Abstract

Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. We developed a model—independent method for determining the WIMP mass by using data (i.e., measured recoil energies) of direct detection experiments. Our method is independent of the as yet unknown WIMP density near the Earth, of the form of the WIMP velocity distribution, as well as of the WIMP—nucleus cross section. It requires however positive signals from at least two detectors with different target nuclei. At the first phase of this work we found a systematic deviation of the reconstructed WIMP mass from the real one for heavy WIMPs. Now we improved this method so that this deviation can be strongly reduced for even very high WIMP mass. The statistical error of the reconstructed mass has also been reduced. In a background—free environment, a WIMP mass of ∼50 GeV could in principle be determined with an error of ∼35% with only 2×50 events.