Taming astrophysical bias in direct dark matter searches

Understand

We explore systematic biases in the identification of dark matter in future direct detection experiments and compare the reconstructed dark matter properties when assuming a self-consistent dark matter distribution function and the standard Maxwellian velocity distribution.

• We find that the systematic bias on the dark matter mass and cross-section determination arising from wrong assumptions for its distribution function is of order ~1\sigma.
• A much larger systematic bias can arise if wrong assumptions are made on the underlying Milky Way mass model.
• However, in both cases the bias is substantially mitigated by marginalizing over galactic model parameters.