Constraints on low-mass WIMPs from the EDELWEISS-III dark matter search

Journal article

We present the results of a search for elastic scattering from galactic dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) in the 4-30 GeV/c2 mass range. We make use of a 582 kg-day fiducial exposure from an array of 800 g Germanium bolometers equipped with a set of interleaved electrodes with full surface coverage. We searched specifically for ∼ 2.5-20 keV nuclear recoils inside the detector fiducial volume. As an illustration the number of observed events in the search for 5 (resp. 20) GeV/c2 WIMPs are 9 (resp. 4), compared to an expected background of 6.1 (resp. 1.4). A 90% CL limit of 4.3 × 10-40 cm2 (resp. 9.4 × 10-44 cm2) is set on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon scattering cross-section for 5 (resp. 20) GeV/c2 WIMPs. This result represents a 41-fold improvement with respect to the previous EDELWEISS-II low-mass WIMP search for 7 GeV/c2 WIMPs. The derived constraint is in tension with hints of WIMP signals from some recent experiments, thus confirming results obtained with different detection techniques.

Authors: Armengaud, E; Arnaud, Q; Augier, C; Benoît, A; Bergé, L

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Insitute of Physics
• Journal: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
• Volume: 2016
• Issue: 05
• Pages: 019
• Publication date: 2016-05-06
• Acceptance date: 2016-04-17
• DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2016/05/019
• ISSN: 1475-7516
• Keywords: dark matter experiments; dark matter detectors