A new halo-independent approach to dark matter direct detection analysis

Journal Article · Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2014 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2014/08/065· OSTI ID:22373363

Feldstein, Brian; Kahlhoefer, Felix ^[1]

---

1. Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, 1 Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3NP (United Kingdom)

Uncertainty in the local dark matter velocity distribution is a key difficulty in the analysis of data from direct detection experiments. Here we propose a new approach for dealing with this uncertainty, which does not involve any assumptions about the structure of the dark matter halo. Given a dark matter model, our method yields the velocity distribution which best describes a set of direct detection data as a finite sum of streams with optimised speeds and densities. The method is conceptually simple and numerically very efficient. We give an explicit example in which the method is applied to determining the ratio of proton to neutron couplings of dark matter from a hypothetical set of future data.

• OSTI ID: 22373363
• Journal Information: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2014, Issue 08; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
DATA ANALYSIS
DETECTION
NEUTRONS
NONLUMINOUS MATTER
PROTONS
VELOCITY