Astrophysics-independent determination of dark matter parameters from two direct detection signals

Understand

Next-generation dark matter direct detection experiments will explore several orders of magnitude in the dark matter--nucleus scattering cross section below current upper limits.

• In case a signal is discovered the immediate task will be to determine the dark matter mass and to study the underlying interactions.
• We develop a framework to determine the dark matter mass from signals in two experiments with different targets, independent of astrophysics.
• Our method relies on a distribution-free, nonparametric two-sample hypothesis test in velocity space, which neither requires binning of the data, nor any fitting of parametrisations of the velocity distribution.