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arXiv · 2510.20889

SENSEI: A Search for Diurnal Modulation in sub-GeV Dark Matter Scattering

Itay M. Bloch·Ana M. Botti·Mariano Cababie·Gustavo Cancelo·Brenda A. Cervantes-Vergara·Miguel Daal·Ansh Desai·Alex Drlica-Wagner·Rouven Essig·Juan Estrada·Erez Etzion·Guillermo Fernandez Moroni·Stephen E. Holland·Jonathan Kehat·Ian Lawson·Steffon Luoma·Aviv Orly·Santiago E. Perez·Dario Rodrigues·Nathan A. Saffold·Silvia Scorza·Miguel Sofo-Haro·Kelly Stifter·Javier Tiffenberg·Sho Uemura·Edgar Marrufo Villalpando·Tomer Volansky·Federico Winkel·Yikai Wu·Tien-Tien Yu·Xavier Bertou
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Abstract

Dark matter particles with sufficiently large interactions with ordinary matter can scatter in the Earth's atmosphere and crust before reaching an underground detector. This Earth-shielding effect can induce a directional dependence in the dark matter flux, leading to a sidereal daily modulation in the signal rate. We perform a search for such a modulation using data from the SENSEI experiment, targeting MeV-scale dark matter. We achieve an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity over previous direct-detection bounds for dark-matter masses below 1 MeV, assuming the Standard Halo Model with a Maxwell--Boltzmann velocity distribution, and constrain the amplitude of a general daily modulation signal to be below 6.8 electrons per gram per day.

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Itay M. Bloch, Ana M. Botti, Mariano Cababie, Gustavo Cancelo, Brenda A. Cervantes-Vergara, Miguel Daal, Ansh Desai, Alex Drlica-Wagner, Rouven Essig, Juan Estrada, Erez Etzion, Guillermo Fernandez Moroni, Stephen E. Holland, Jonathan Kehat, Ian Lawson, Steffon Luoma, Aviv Orly, Santiago E. Perez, Dario Rodrigues, Nathan A. Saffold, Silvia Scorza, Miguel Sofo-Haro, Kelly Stifter, Javier Tiffenberg, Sho Uemura, Edgar Marrufo Villalpando, Tomer Volansky, Federico Winkel, Yikai Wu, Tien-Tien Yu, Xavier Bertou. 2025-10-23. SENSEI: A Search for Diurnal Modulation in sub-GeV Dark Matter Scattering. https://doi.org/10.1103/1gpp-3tqd

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