Recent results in the search for dark matter with noble liquid detectors

TL;DR

Recent advances in noble liquid detectors have significantly contributed to dark matter searches, but recent results challenge our understanding of low-energy responses and highlight inconsistencies with potential low-mass WIMP signals.

Contribution

This paper reviews recent experimental results using noble liquid detectors and analyzes the discrepancies related to low-energy responses and low-mass WIMP signals.

Findings

Noble liquid detectors are scalable and effective for dark matter detection.

Recent results have raised questions about the low-energy response physics.

Inconsistencies exist between experimental results and potential low-mass WIMP signals.

Abstract

The field of dark matter direct detection has seen important contributions in recent years from experiments involving liquid noble gases, specifically liquid argon and liquid xenon. These detection media offer many properties deemed useful in this search, including fast scintillation response, charge readout, 3-D position reconstruction, and nuclear recoil discrimination. Part of the very rapid emergence and dominance of noble liquids is due to the fact that these technologies are easily scalable to nearly arbitrary size and mass. However, the physics impact of recent results has called into question our understanding of the low-energy response of these detection media, in light of apparent contradictions with a possible low-mass WIMP signal observed in the DAMA/LIBRA and CoGeNT experiments. I discuss recent results and examine the details of this inconsistency.