The effect of the recoil energy window on the results of direct dark matter experiments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the choice of recoil energy window affects dark matter experiment results, demonstrating that the energy window choice explains plot intersections and proposing a method to optimize this window.

Contribution

It introduces a method to determine the optimal high-energy limit of the recoil energy window in dark matter experiments.

Findings

The intersection of XENON10 and CDMS exclusion plots is caused by the narrow energy window used.

A new method to determine the optimal recoil energy window is proposed.

Adjusting the energy window can significantly influence experimental exclusion limits.

Abstract

The effect of the chosen analysis energy window on the results of a dark matter experiment is exemplified by the curious intersection of the exclusion plots of the XENON10 and the CDMS experiments. After proving that the narrow energy window XENON10 chose to analyze is indeed the cause of such intersection, a method to determine the high-energy extreme of the recoil energy window an experiment should use is obtained.