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Fog on the horizon: a new definition of the neutrino floor for direct dark matter searches

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arxiv 2109.03116 v2 pith:WE24MF7I submitted 2021-09-07 hep-ph astro-ph.COhep-ex

Fog on the horizon: a new definition of the neutrino floor for direct dark matter searches

classification hep-ph astro-ph.COhep-ex
keywords neutrinofloordarklimitmatterdirectexperimentalexposure
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The neutrino floor is a theoretical lower limit on WIMP-like dark matter models that are discoverable in direct detection experiments. It is commonly interpreted as the point at which dark matter signals become hidden underneath a remarkably similar-looking background from neutrinos. However, it has been known for some time that the neutrino floor is not a hard limit, but can be pushed past with sufficient statistics. As a consequence, some have recently advocated for calling it the "neutrino fog" instead. The downside of current methods of deriving the neutrino floor are that they rely on arbitrary choices of experimental exposure and energy threshold. Here we propose to define the neutrino floor as the boundary of the neutrino fog, and develop a calculation free from these assumptions. The technique is based on the derivative of a hypothetical experimental discovery limit as a function of exposure, and leads to a neutrino floor that is only influenced by the systematic uncertainties on the neutrino flux normalisations. Our floor is broadly similar to those found in the literature, but differs by almost an order of magnitude in the sub-GeV range, and above 20~GeV.

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