Fundamental statistical limitations of future dark matter direct detection experiments

Understand

We discuss irreducible statistical limitations of future ton-scale dark matter direct detection experiments.

• We focus in particular on the coverage of confidence intervals, which quantifies the reliability of the statistical method used to reconstruct the dark matter parameters, and the bias of the reconstructed parameters.
• We study 36 benchmark dark matter models within the reach of upcoming ton-scale experiments.
• We find that approximate confidence intervals from a profile-likelihood analysis exactly cover or over-cover the true values of the WIMP parameters, and are hence conservative.