Dark matter direct-detection experiments

TL;DR

This review summarizes the current status of direct dark matter detection experiments, focusing on detector technologies, signal expectations, backgrounds, and data analysis methods, highlighting progress and ongoing challenges in identifying dark matter particles.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of detector technologies and methodologies used in direct dark matter searches, emphasizing recent advancements and remaining obstacles.

Findings

Detector sensitivities have significantly improved over decades.

No definitive dark matter particle detection has been achieved yet.

Various backgrounds and calibration strategies are critical for data analysis.

Abstract

In the past decades, several detector technologies have been developed with the quest to directly detect dark matter interactions and to test one of the most important unsolved questions in modern physics. The sensitivity of these experiments has improved with a tremendous speed due to a constant development of the detectors and analysis methods, proving uniquely suited devices to solve the dark matter puzzle, as all other discovery strategies can only indirectly infer its existence. Despite the overwhelming evidence for dark matter from cosmological indications at small and large scales, a clear evidence for a particle explaining these observations remains absent. This review summarises the status of direct dark matter searches, focussing on the detector technologies used to directly detect a dark matter particle producing recoil energies in the keV energy scale. The phenomenological signal expectations, main background sources, statistical treatment of data and calibration strategies are discussed.