Abstract
Experiments that use liquid noble gases as target materials, such as argon and xenon, play a significant role in direct detection searches for weakly interacting massive particles(-like) dark matter. As these experiments grow in size, they will soon encounter a new background to their dark matter discovery potential from neutrino scattering off nuclei and electrons in their targets. Therefore, a better understanding of this new source of background is crucial for future large-scale experiments such as ARGO and DARWIN. In this work, we study the impact of atmospheric neutrino flux uncertainties, electron recoil rejection efficiency, recoil energy sensitivity, and other related factors on the dark matter discovery reach. We also show that a significant improvement in sensitivity can potentially be obtained, at large exposures, by combining data from independent argon and xenon experiments.
Highlights
Understanding the nature of dark matter remains one of the most significant open questions in fundamental science
We study the impact of atmospheric neutrino flux uncertainties, electron recoil rejection efficiency, recoil energy sensitivity, and other related factors on the dark matter discovery reach
Based on the recent performance of DEAP-3600 [32], we assume a nuclear recoil energy region of interest (ROI) in argon of electron recoils (ER) ∈ 1⁄255; 100 keV, we study the impact of reducing the lower energy threshold
Summary
Understanding the nature of dark matter remains one of the most significant open questions in fundamental science. The focus of this paper are direct detection experiments that look for local dark matter scattering on target nuclei in deep underground detectors [7–9] Such experiments are well-suited to finding weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and WIMP-like dark matter [20– 24]. Work is already under way on DARWIN based on xenon with an exposure goal of nearly 200 t yr [39], and ARGO based on argon reaching an exposure of 3000 t yr [40] As such dark matter detectors grow in size and sensitivity, neutrinos from the sun [41,42], cosmic rays in the atmosphere [43–45], and diffuse supernovae [46–48] will become significant backgrounds to dark matter searches [49–56].
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