Fog on the horizon: a new definition of the neutrino floor for direct dark matter searches

Understand

The neutrino floor is a theoretical lower limit on WIMP-like dark matter models that are discoverable in direct detection experiments.

• It is commonly interpreted as the point at which dark matter signals become hidden underneath a remarkably similar-looking background from neutrinos.
• However, it has been known for some time that the neutrino floor is not a hard limit, but can be pushed past with sufficient statistics.
• As a consequence, some have recently advocated for calling it the "neutrino fog" instead.