Theoretical Interpretation of Experimental Data from Direct Dark Matter Detection

Abstract

Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. Currently, the most promising method to detect WIMPs is the direct detection of the recoil energy deposited in a low-background laboratory detector due to elastic WIMP-nucleus scattering. So far the usual procedure has been to predict the event rate of direct detection of WIMPs based on some model(s) of the Galactic halo from cosmology and of WIMPs from elementary particle physics. The aim of this work is to invert this process. In this thesis I present methods which allow to reconstruct (the moments of) the WIMP velocity distribution function as well as to determine the WIMP mass from the recoil energy spectrum as well as from experimental data directly. The reconstruction of the velocity distribution function has been further extended to take into account the annual modulation of the event rate. Moreover, the reconstruction of the amplitude of the annual modulation of the velocity distribution and an alternative, better way for confirming the annual modulation of the event rate have been discussed. On the other hand, the determination of the WIMP mass by combining two (or more) experiments with different detector materials has been developed. All formulae and expressions given here are not only independent of the model of Galactic halo but also of that of WIMPs. This means that we need neither the as yet unknown WIMP density near the Earth nor the WIMP-nucleus cross section. The only information which we need is the measured recoil energies and their measuring times.