Results Of Direct Detection Experiments Research Articles

Dark antiatoms can explain DAMA

We show that the existence of a sub-dominant form of dark matter, made of dark “antiatoms” of mass m∼ 1 TeV and size ȧ0∼ 3 fm, can explain the results of direct detection experiments, with a positive signal in DAMA/NaI and DAMA/LIBRA and no signal in other experiments. The signal comes from the binding of the dark antiatoms to thallium, a dopant in DAMA, and is not present for the constituent atoms of other experiments. The dark antiatoms are made of two particles oppositely charged under a dark U(1) symmetry and can bind to terrestrial atoms because of a kinetic mixing between the photon and the massless dark photon, such that the dark particles acquire an electric millicharge ∼ ± 5.10−4e. This millicharge enables them to bind to high-Z atoms via radiative capture, after they thermalize in terrestrial matter through elastic collisions.

Form factor effects in the direct detection of isospin-violating dark matter

Isospin-violating dark matter (IVDM) provides a possible mechanism to ameliorate the tension among recent direct detection experiments. For IVDM, we demonstrate that the results of direct detection experiments based on neutron-rich target nuclei may depend strongly on the density dependence of the symmetry energy which is presently largely unknown and controls the neutron skin thickness that reflects the relative difference of neutron and proton form factors in the neutron-rich nuclei. In particular, using the neutron and proton form factors obtained from Skyrme-Hartree-Fock calculations by varying the symmetry energy within the uncertainty region set by the latest model-independent measurement of the neutron skin thickness of 208Pb from PREX experiment at JLab, we find that, for IVDM with neutron-to-proton coupling ratio fixed to fn/fp=-0.7, the form factor effect may enhance the sensitivity of Xe-based detectors (e.g., XENON100 and LUX) to the DM-proton cross section by a factor of 3 in the DM mass region constrained by CMDS-II(Si) and even by more than an order of magnitude for heavy DM with mass larger than 80 GeV, compared with the results using the empirical Helm form factor. Our results further indicate that the form factor effect can significantly modify the recoil spectrum of Xe-based detectors for heavy IVDM with fn/fp=-0.7.

Can neutralinos in the MSSM and NMSSM scenarios still be light?

Since the recent results of direct detection experiments at low mass, many authors have revisited the case of light (1 -10) GeV WIMPs. In particular, there have been a few attempts to explain the results from the DAMA/LIBRA, CDMS and/or CoGeNT experiments by invoking neutralinos lighter than 15 GeV. Here we show that in the MSSM, such light particles are completely ruled out by the TEVATRON limits on the mass of the pseudoscalar Higgs. On the contrary, in the NMSSM, we find that light neutralinos could still be viable candidates. In fact, in some cases, they may even have an elastic scattering cross section on nucleons in the range that is needed to explain either the DAMA/LIBRA, CoGeNT or CDMS recent results. Finally, we revisit the lowest limit on the neutralino mass in the MSSM and find that neutralinos should be heavier than ~28 GeV to evade present experimental bounds.