TY - JOUR
T1 - SENSEI
T2 - A Search for Diurnal Modulation in Sub-GeV Dark Matter Scattering
AU - (SENSEI Collaboration)
AU - Bloch, Itay M.
AU - Botti, Ana M.
AU - Cababie, Mariano
AU - Cancelo, Gustavo
AU - Cervantes-Vergara, Brenda A.
AU - Daal, Miguel
AU - Desai, Ansh
AU - Drlica-Wagner, Alex
AU - Essig, Rouven
AU - Estrada, Juan
AU - Etzion, Erez
AU - Moroni, Guillermo Fernandez
AU - Holland, Stephen E.
AU - Kehat, Jonathan
AU - Lawson, Ian
AU - Luoma, Steffon
AU - Orly, Aviv
AU - Perez, Santiago E.
AU - Rodrigues, Dario
AU - Saffold, Nathan A.
AU - Scorza, Silvia
AU - Sofo-Haro, Miguel
AU - Stifter, Kelly
AU - Tiffenberg, Javier
AU - Uemura, Sho
AU - Villalpando, Edgar Marrufo
AU - Volansky, Tomer
AU - Winkel, Federico
AU - Wu, Yikai
AU - Yu, Tien Tien
AU - Bertou, Xavier
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 American Physical Society.
PY - 2026/5/29
Y1 - 2026/5/29
N2 - 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 nearly 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 restrict the amplitude of a general daily modulation signal to be below 6.8 e/g/d.
AB - 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 nearly 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 restrict the amplitude of a general daily modulation signal to be below 6.8 e/g/d.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105042414595
U2 - 10.1103/1gpp-3tqd
DO - 10.1103/1gpp-3tqd
M3 - Article
C2 - 42285076
AN - SCOPUS:105042414595
SN - 0031-9007
VL - 136
JO - Physical Review Letters
JF - Physical Review Letters
IS - 21
M1 - 211001
ER -