Daily modulation due to channeling in direct dark matter crystalline detectors

Understand

The channeling of the ion recoiling after a collision with a WIMP in direct dark matter crystalline detectors produces a larger scintillation or ionization signal than otherwise expected.

• Channeling is a directional effect which depends on the velocity distribution of WIMPs in the dark halo of our Galaxy and could lead to a daily modulation of the signal.
• Here we compute upper bounds to the expected amplitude of daily modulation due to channeling using channeling fractions that we obtained with analytic models in prior work.
• After developing the general formalism, we examine the possibility of finding a daily modulation due to channeling in the data already collected by the DAMA/NaI and DAMA/LIBRA experiments.