Speaker
Description
The long-running search for particle dark matter via an annually-modulating WIMP-nucleon interaction has received important updates in recent years with new results from the ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100 experiments. In this paper, we quantify the tension between the reported DAMA signal and ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100 in two different ways. The first is based on the effective field theory of a Dirac fermion dark matter candidate that is a singlet under the Standard Model gauge group, and which has a Maxwellian velocity distribution in the frame of the local dark matter halo. The second, more conservative approach, is to assume a generic functional form for the recoil energy spectrum induced by WIMP-nucleon scattering, and reconstruct the expected signatures in ANAIS-112, COSINE-100 and DAMA. This allows the tension between experiments to be quantified, but without constraints from realistic particle, nuclear and astrophysics. I will show that the DAMA result is now in substantial tension with COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112. In the case that the WIMP is able to scatter off both Na and I, a highly fine-tuned scenario can be used to reconcile the three experiments somewhat, but this presents a significant challenge to model builders.
