Seminars and Journal Clubs

On the sensitivity of direct detection experiments to multi-component dark matter

by Andre Scaffidi

Europe/Brussels
E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349)

Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve)

30
Description

The Weakly Interacting Massive Particle or `WIMP' has been a widely studied solution to the dark matter problem.  A plausible scenario is that DM is not made up of a single WIMP species, but that it has a multi-component nature. In this talk I give an overview of recently published work in which we studied direct detection signals in the presence of multi-component WIMP-like DM. I will give an overview of the `smoking gun' signature of two-component dark matter, as well as give a detailed explanation of the statistical methods used to forecast a signal in future generations of direct detection detectors. The two main avenues for forecasting that I will present involve a) discriminating between the one and two-component hypothesis and b) parameter reconstruction. I will also present an example of a minimal extension to the general model independent two-component phase space by introducing constraints from thermal freeze out. To conclude I will show our latest results from a two-component fit to the latest DAMA/LIBRA phase-2 results and discuss the issues and limitations one faces when taking into account corrections from gravitational focusing.