New constraints and prospects for sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon
Abstract
We study in detail sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon, including the expected electron recoil spectra and annual modulation spectra. We derive improved constraints using low-energy XENON10 and XENON100 ionization-only data. For XENON10, in addition to including electron-recoil data corresponding to about 1–3 electrons, we include for the first time events corresponding to about 4–7 electrons. Assuming the scattering is momentum independent (FDM = 1 ), this strengthens a previous cross-section bound by almost an order of magnitude for dark matter masses above 50 MeV. The available XENON100 data corresponds to events with about 4–50 electrons, and leads to a constraint that is comparable to the XENON10 bound above 50 MeV for FDM = 1 . We demonstrate that a search for an annual modulation signal in upcoming xenon experiments (XENON1T, XENONnT, LZ) could substantially improve the above bounds even in the presence of large backgrounds. We also emphasize that in simple benchmark models of sub-GeV dark matter, the dark matter-electron scattering rate can be as high as one event every ten (two) seconds in the XENON1T (XENONnT or LZ) experiments, without being in conflict with any other known experimental bounds. While there are several sources of backgroundsmore »
- Authors:
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- New York Univ. (NYU), NY (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1377658
- Alternate Identifier(s):
- OSTI ID: 1426144
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0008061
- Resource Type:
- Published Article
- Journal Name:
- Physical Review D
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Name: Physical Review D Journal Volume: 96 Journal Issue: 4; Journal ID: ISSN 2470-0010
- Publisher:
- American Physical Society (APS)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
Citation Formats
Essig, Rouven, Volansky, Tomer, and Yu, Tien-Tien. New constraints and prospects for sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon. United States: N. p., 2017.
Web. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.96.043017.
Essig, Rouven, Volansky, Tomer, & Yu, Tien-Tien. New constraints and prospects for sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon. United States. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.043017
Essig, Rouven, Volansky, Tomer, and Yu, Tien-Tien. Wed .
"New constraints and prospects for sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon". United States. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.043017.
@article{osti_1377658,
title = {New constraints and prospects for sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon},
author = {Essig, Rouven and Volansky, Tomer and Yu, Tien-Tien},
abstractNote = {We study in detail sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon, including the expected electron recoil spectra and annual modulation spectra. We derive improved constraints using low-energy XENON10 and XENON100 ionization-only data. For XENON10, in addition to including electron-recoil data corresponding to about 1–3 electrons, we include for the first time events corresponding to about 4–7 electrons. Assuming the scattering is momentum independent (FDM = 1 ), this strengthens a previous cross-section bound by almost an order of magnitude for dark matter masses above 50 MeV. The available XENON100 data corresponds to events with about 4–50 electrons, and leads to a constraint that is comparable to the XENON10 bound above 50 MeV for FDM = 1 . We demonstrate that a search for an annual modulation signal in upcoming xenon experiments (XENON1T, XENONnT, LZ) could substantially improve the above bounds even in the presence of large backgrounds. We also emphasize that in simple benchmark models of sub-GeV dark matter, the dark matter-electron scattering rate can be as high as one event every ten (two) seconds in the XENON1T (XENONnT or LZ) experiments, without being in conflict with any other known experimental bounds. While there are several sources of backgrounds that can produce single- or few-electron events, a large event rate can be consistent with a dark matter signal and should not be simply written off as purely a detector curiosity. This fact motivates a detailed analysis of the ionization-data (“S2”) data, taking into account the expected annual modulation spectrum of the signal rate, as well as the DM-induced electron-recoil spectra, which are another powerful discriminant between signal and background.},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevD.96.043017},
journal = {Physical Review D},
number = 4,
volume = 96,
place = {United States},
year = {2017},
month = {8}
}
Free Publicly Available Full Text
Publisher's Version of Record
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.043017
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.043017
Other availability
Search WorldCat to find libraries that may hold this journal
Cited by: 223 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science
Web of Science
Save to My Library
You must Sign In or Create an Account in order to save documents to your library.
Works referenced in this record:
Detectability of Light Dark Matter with Superfluid Helium
journal, September 2016
- Schutz, Katelin; Zurek, Kathryn M.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 117, Issue 12
The four basic ways of creating dark matter through a portal
journal, May 2012
- Chu, Xiaoyong; Hambye, Thomas; Tytgat, Michel H. G.
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2012, Issue 05
Dark Matter Detectors as Dark Photon Helioscopes
journal, July 2013
- An, Haipeng; Pospelov, Maxim; Pradler, Josef
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 111, Issue 4
Recombination of electron-ion pairs in liquid argon and liquid xenon
journal, July 1987
- Thomas, J.; Imel, D. A.
- Physical Review A, Vol. 36, Issue 2
Direct detection constraints on dark photon dark matter
journal, July 2015
- An, Haipeng; Pospelov, Maxim; Pradler, Josef
- Physics Letters B, Vol. 747
Detecting superlight dark matter with Fermi-degenerate materials
journal, August 2016
- Hochberg, Yonit; Pyle, Matt; Zhao, Yue
- Journal of High Energy Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 8
Absorption of light dark matter in semiconductors
journal, January 2017
- Hochberg, Yonit; Lin, Tongyan; Zurek, Kathryn M.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 95, Issue 2
Observation and applications of single-electron charge signals in the XENON100 experiment
journal, February 2014
- Aprile, E.; Alfonsi, M.; Arisaka, K.
- Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, Vol. 41, Issue 3
New Results from the Search for Low-Mass Weakly Interacting Massive Particles with the CDMS Low Ionization Threshold Experiment
journal, February 2016
- Agnese, R.; Anderson, A. J.; Aramaki, T.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 116, Issue 7
Direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter with scintillating targets
journal, July 2017
- Derenzo, Stephen; Essig, Rouven; Massari, Andrea
- Physical Review D, Vol. 96, Issue 1
Scalar dark matter candidates
journal, April 2004
- Bœhm, C.; Fayet, P.
- Nuclear Physics B, Vol. 683, Issue 1-2
Terrestrial effects on dark matter-electron scattering experiments
journal, July 2017
- Emken, Timon; Kouvaris, Chris; Shoemaker, Ian M.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 96, Issue 1
Local stellar kinematics from Hipparcos data
journal, August 1998
- Dehnen, W.; Binney, J. J.
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 298, Issue 2
Probing Sub-GeV Dark Matter with Conventional Detectors
journal, January 2017
- Kouvaris, Chris; Pradler, Josef
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 118, Issue 3
Directional detection of dark matter with two-dimensional targets
journal, September 2017
- Hochberg, Yonit; Kahn, Yonatan; Lisanti, Mariangela
- Physics Letters B, Vol. 772
Observation of anticorrelation between scintillation and ionization for MeV gamma rays in liquid xenon
journal, July 2007
- Aprile, E.; Giboni, K. L.; Majewski, P.
- Physical Review B, Vol. 76, Issue 1
Detecting cold dark-matter candidates
journal, June 1986
- Drukier, Andrzej K.; Freese, Katherine; Spergel, David N.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 33, Issue 12
Results on the Spin-Dependent Scattering of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles on Nucleons from the Run 3 Data of the LUX Experiment
journal, April 2016
- Akerib, D. S.; Araújo, H. M.; Bai, X.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 116, Issue 16
Design and performance of the XENON10 dark matter experiment
journal, April 2011
- Aprile, E.; Angle, J.; Arneodo, F.
- Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 34, Issue 9
Symmetric and asymmetric light dark matter
journal, March 2012
- Lin, Tongyan; Yu, Hai-Bo; Zurek, Kathryn M.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 85, Issue 6
Semiconductor probes of light dark matter
journal, November 2012
- Graham, Peter W.; Kaplan, David E.; Rajendran, Surjeet
- Physics of the Dark Universe, Vol. 1, Issue 1-2
The RAVE survey: constraining the local Galactic escape speed
journal, August 2007
- Smith, M. C.; Ruchti, G. R.; Helmi, A.
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 379, Issue 2
Light dark matter in superfluid helium: Detection with multi-excitation production
journal, March 2017
- Knapen, Simon; Lin, Tongyan; Zurek, Kathryn M.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 95, Issue 5
Erratum: Low-mass dark matter search using ionization signals in XENON100 [Phys. Rev. D 94 , 092001 (2016)]
journal, March 2017
- Aprile, E.; Aalbers, J.; Agostini, F.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 95, Issue 5
Physics reach of the XENON1T dark matter experiment.
journal, April 2016
- Aprile, E.; Aalbers, J.; Agostini, F.
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 04
Magnetic bubble chambers and sub-GeV dark matter direct detection
journal, May 2017
- Bunting, Philip C.; Gratta, Giorgio; Melia, Tom
- Physical Review D, Vol. 95, Issue 9
Planck 2015 results : XIII. Cosmological parameters
journal, September 2016
- Ade, P. A. R.; Aghanim, N.; Arnaud, M.
- Astronomy & Astrophysics, Vol. 594
Direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter with semiconductor targets
journal, May 2016
- Essig, Rouven; Fernández-Serra, Marivi; Mardon, Jeremy
- Journal of High Energy Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 5
Low-mass dark matter search using ionization signals in XENON100
journal, November 2016
- Aprile, E.; Aalbers, J.; Agostini, F.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 94, Issue 9
Results from a Search for Dark Matter in the Complete LUX Exposure
journal, January 2017
- Akerib, D. S.; Alsum, S.; Araújo, H. M.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 118, Issue 2
Direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter
journal, April 2012
- Essig, Rouven; Mardon, Jeremy; Volansky, Tomer
- Physical Review D, Vol. 85, Issue 7
Detection of sub-GeV dark matter and solar neutrinos via chemical-bond breaking
journal, March 2017
- Essig, Rouven; Mardon, Jeremy; Slone, Oren
- Physical Review D, Vol. 95, Issue 5
Search for Light Dark Matter in XENON10 Data
journal, July 2011
- Angle, J.; Aprile, E.; Arneodo, F.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 107, Issue 5
Modulation effects in dark matter-electron scattering experiments
journal, October 2015
- Lee, Samuel K.; Lisanti, Mariangela; Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth
- Physical Review D, Vol. 92, Issue 8
Searching for dark absorption with direct detection experiments
journal, June 2017
- Bloch, Itay M.; Essig, Rouven; Tobioka, Kohsaku
- Journal of High Energy Physics, Vol. 2017, Issue 6
First Direct Detection Limits on Sub-GeV Dark Matter from XENON10
journal, July 2012
- Essig, Rouven; Manalaysay, Aaron; Mardon, Jeremy
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 109, Issue 2
Roothaan-Hartree-Fock Ground-State Atomic Wave Functions: Slater-Type Orbital Expansions and Expectation Values for Z = 2-54
journal, January 1993
- Bunge, C. F.; Barrientos, J. A.; Bunge, A. V.
- Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables, Vol. 53, Issue 1
Probing MeV Dark Matter at Low-Energy Colliders
journal, April 2006
- Borodatchenkova, Natalia; Choudhury, Debajyoti; Drees, Manuel
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 96, Issue 14
Absolute Scintillation Yields in Liquid Argon and Xenon for Various Particles
journal, March 2002
- Doke, Tadayoshi; Hitachi, Akira; Kikuchi, Jun
- Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 41, Issue Part 1, No. 3A
Current dark matter annihilation constraints from CMB and low-redshift data
journal, May 2014
- Madhavacheril, Mathew S.; Sehgal, Neelima; Slatyer, Tracy R.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 89, Issue 10
Superconducting Detectors for Superlight Dark Matter
journal, January 2016
- Hochberg, Yonit; Zhao, Yue; Zurek, Kathryn M.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 116, Issue 1
Nuclear recoil energy scale in liquid xenon with application to the direct detection of dark matter
journal, March 2011
- Sorensen, Peter; Dahl, Carl Eric
- Physical Review D, Vol. 83, Issue 6