Complementarity of dark matter detectors in light of the neutrino background

Direct detection dark matter experiments looking for WIMP-nucleus elastic scattering will soon be sensitive to an irreducible background from neutrinos which will drastically affect their discovery potential. Here we explore how the neutrino background will affect future ton-scale experiments consid...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ruppin, F. (Contributor), Strigari, L. (Author), Billard, Julien (Contributor), Figueroa-Feliciano, Enectali (Contributor)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society, 2014-10-09T18:56:34Z.
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Summary:Direct detection dark matter experiments looking for WIMP-nucleus elastic scattering will soon be sensitive to an irreducible background from neutrinos which will drastically affect their discovery potential. Here we explore how the neutrino background will affect future ton-scale experiments considering both spin-dependent and spin-independent interactions. We show that combining data from experiments using different targets can improve the dark matter discovery potential due to target complementarity. We find that in the context of spin-dependent interactions, combining results from several targets can greatly enhance the subtraction of the neutrino background for WIMP masses below 10  GeV/c[superscript 2] and therefore probe dark matter models to lower cross sections. In the context of target complementarity, we also explore how one can tune the relative exposures of different target materials to optimize the WIMP discovery potential.
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant PHY-1417457)
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant NSF-0847342)