The neutrino roof: Single-scatter ceilings in dark matter direct detection

TL;DR

This paper defines the ultimate sensitivity limits of dark matter direct detection experiments imposed by neutrino backgrounds, extending the understanding of detection ceilings to extremely high dark matter masses and cross sections.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of the 'neutrino roof' as a fundamental sensitivity ceiling due to atmospheric neutrinos, and recasts existing WIMP search data to explore these limits across a wide parameter space.

Findings

Ceilings scale logarithmically with dark matter mass for heavy particles.

Current detectors are approaching the neutrino background limit.

Future large-scale detectors could probe parameter space up to the Planck mass.

Abstract

We identify the maximum cross sections probed by single-scatter ``WIMP" searches in dark matter direct detection. Due to Poisson fluctuations in scatter multiplicity, these ceilings scale logarithmically with mass for heavy dark matter and often lie in regions probed by multiscatter searches. Using a generalized formula for single-scatter event rates we recast WIMP searches by the quintal-to-tonne scale detectors XENON1T, XENONnT, LZ, PANDAX-II, PANDAX-4T, DarkSide-50 and DEAP-3600 to obtain ceilings and floors up to a few $10^{17}$ GeV mass and $10^{-22}$ cm$^2$ per-nucleus cross section. We do this for coherent, geometric, isospin-violating xenophobic and argophobic spin-independent scattering, and neutron-only and proton-only spin-dependent scattering. Future large-exposure detectors would register an almost irreducible background of atmospheric neutrinos that would determine a dark matter sensitivity ceiling that we call the ``neutrino roof", in analogy with the well-studied ``neutrino floor". Accounting for this background, we estimate the reaches of the 10$-$100 tonne scale DarkSide-20k, DARWIN/XLZD, PANDAX-xT, and Argo, which would probe many decades of unconstrained parameter space up to the Planck mass, as well as of $10^3-10^4$ tonne scale noble liquid detectors that have been proposed in synergy with neutrino experiments.