Solar neutrinos and dark matter detection with diurnal modulation

Understand

We investigate the diurnal modulation of the event rate for dark matter scattering on solid targets arising from the directionally dependent defect creation threshold energy.

• In particular, we quantify how this effect would help in separating dark matter signal from the neutrino background.
• We perform a benchmark analysis for a germanium detector and compute how the reach of the experiment is affected by including the timing information of the scattering events.
• We observe that for light dark matter just above the detection threshold the magnitude of the annual modulation is enhanced.