First limits on WIMP dark matter from the XENON10 experiment

Abstract

Abstract. XENON10 is a dual phase liquid/gas xenon Time Projection Chamber (TPC) for the direct search of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) Dark Matter (DM). The detector, located in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, aims at measuring the recoil energy from elastic WIMP-nucleus scattering. It distinguishes electronic interactions (gamma and beta backgrounds) from nuclear recoils based on a different ratio in yields of ionization charge and scintillation light. This discrimination technique reduces background by a factor of 200 -1000 in the energy range of interest, at a nuclear recoil acceptance of 50%. Background is further reduced by the self-shielding properties of liquid xenon, as the 3D position resolution of the TPC is used to define an inner fiducial volume of low background. XENON10 was extensively calibrated with gamma and neutron sources. A blind search, with data cuts fixed a priori based on calibration data and 16 days of unblinded background data, had an exposure of 136 kg days at a fiducial mass of 5.4 kg. We report our first upper limit on WIMP DM interactions of 8.8 × 10 −44 cm 2 for a WIMP mass of 100 GeV/c 2 , which is a factor of 2.3 below the best previous limit.

Supersymmetry without prejudice

“…Over essentially all of the parameter space, the spin-independent constraints are presently found to be dominant. We include the cross section bounds arising from XENON10 [37], CDMS [38], CRESST I [39] and DAMA [40] data. Given the uncertainties from low energy physics (e.g., nuclear form factors) in the determination of these cross sections, we allow for a factor of 4 uncertainty in these calculations.…”

Constraints on the pMSSM from searches for squarks and gluinos by ATLAS

“…• cross section limits from direct detection dark matter searches by XENON10 [51], CDMS [52], CRESST I [53] and DAMA [54] • constraints from LEP and LEPII data [55], here especially that there cannot be any new charged sparticles or Higgs boson below the M Z /2 mass and also no new stable particles with masses below 100 GeV, also the lower limit for light squark masses when the gluino is heavier than the squarks by ALEPH [56] • and finally constraints from Tevatron data, where the limits for squark and gluino masses [57,58] are generalized to model independent constraints, also applied are the limits on tanβ by both CDF and D0 [59] and the lower limits for heavy stable charged particles, here the stronger limit by D0 [60] was applied.…”

Dark Matter in the MSSM

“…Both spin-independent and spin-dependent cross sections were calculated using micrOMEGAs2.21 [9]. We implement cross section limits from XENON10 [41], CDMS [42], CRESST I [43] and DAMA [44] data. Since these cross sections depend on some low energy quantities for which the uncertainties are relatively large (e.g., nuclear form factors), we do not exclude models with WIMP-nucleon spinindependent cross sections as much as 4 times larger than the experimental bounds.…”