Comparing readout strategies to directly detect dark matter

TL;DR

This paper compares various readout strategies for direct dark matter detection, demonstrating that directional detection significantly enhances sensitivity, especially in high-background scenarios, with 1D detection nearly as effective as 3D.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of detection strategies, highlighting the advantages of directional detection and quantifying the impact of dimensional sensitivity and sense recognition.

Findings

Directional detection improves sensitivity by several orders of magnitude in high-background scenarios.

1D directional detection is about three times less effective than 3D detection with sense recognition.

Energy-only detection still offers notable improvements, especially when directional information is limited.

Abstract

Over the past decades, several ideas and technologies have been developed to directly detect WIMP from the galactic halo. All these detection strategies share the common goal of discriminating a WIMP signal from the residual backgrounds. By directly detecting WIMPs, one can measure some or all of the observables associated to each nuclear recoil candidates, such as their energy and direction. In this study, we compare and examine the discovery potentials of each readout strategies from counting only (bubble chambers) to directional detectors (Time Projection Chambers) with 1d-, 2d-, and 3d-sensitivity. Using a profile likelihood analysis, we show that, in the case of a large and irreducible background contamination characterized by an energy distribution similar to the expected WIMP signal, directional information can improve the sensitivity of the experiment by several orders of magnitude. We also found that 1d directional detection is only less effective than a full 3d directional sensitivity by about a factor of 3, or 10 if we assume no sense recognition, still improving by a factor of 2 or more if only the energy of the events is being measured.