The Dark Matter Inverse Problem

In all plots we display and label 95% confidence level contours for direct detection of dark matter particles. We utilize argon (Ar), germanium (Ge), and xenon (Xe) targets.

We have two normalization conventions: "equal exposures," in which all experiments collect data for 2 ton years, leading to more events in xenon and fewer events in argon as compared to germanium; and "equal events," in which we reduce the xenon exposure, increase the argon exposure, and lower the argon energy threshold from 20 keV to 5 keV in order to acheive 300 events and the same binning range in all detectors.

We expect the equal exposures normalization to more nearly correspond to the next generation of dark matter detectors, and we use the equal events normalization to disentangle the effects of statistics on our results.

The conclusions from these different normalizations can be quantified by a figure of merit, Y, which is the inverse of the minimum log-likelihood of the global fit to the data. We find that both normalizations provide the same power for extracting particle physics information.

We use this website to display this wealth of plots as follows:

The Dark Matter Inverse Problem:Extracting Particle Physics from Scattering Events

The Dark Matter Inverse Problem:
Extracting Particle Physics from Scattering Events