Proposal for the resolution of the disagreement between DAMA and other Underground Dark Matter Experiments
Abstract
It is a great mystery still needing a solution that the underground experiments looking for dark matter disagree, in tIt is a great mystery still needing a solution that the underground experiments looking for dark matter disagree, in the sense that DAMA/LIBRA has found dark matter with a confidence level of several standard deviations, while neither the xenon based experiments nor even the experiments using the same target material NaI(Tl) as DAMA see the same amount of dark matter. We propose to solve this enigma by postulating that the dark matter gets excited during its passage through the mountain shielding from outer space down to the experimental halls; the DAMA experiment is namely about twice as deep as the ANAIS and COSINE-100 experiments, so that there is longer passage time for DAMA, which thus gets more excited dark matter particles. The xenon-scintillator experiments have their strong limits for dark matter making itself felt via nucleus recoils, and thus we can just assume that the excited dark matter mainly emits e.g. electrons, and the xenon-experiments would hardly see such dark matter. The single event recently seen by LUX/ZEPPELIN could be due to a low rate of nucleus emission in addition to the hypothesised electrons.
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BibTeX
@misc{froggatt2026proposal,
title = {{Proposal for the resolution of the disagreement between DAMA and other Underground Dark Matter Experiments}},
author = {C. D. Froggatt and H. B. Nielsen},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.00306},
eprint = {2611.00306},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00306},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Proposal for the resolution of the disagreement between DAMA and other Underground Dark Matter Experiments
AU - C. D. Froggatt
AU - H. B. Nielsen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.00306
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00306
AB - It is a great mystery still needing a solution that the underground experiments looking for dark matter disagree, in tIt is a great mystery still needing a solution that the underground experiments looking for dark matter disagree, in the sense that DAMA/LIBRA has found dark matter with a confidence level of several standard deviations, while neither the xenon based experiments nor even the experiments using the same target material NaI(Tl) as DAMA see the same amount of dark matter. We propose to solve this enigma by postulating that the dark matter gets excited during its passage through the mountain shielding from outer space down to the experimental halls; the DAMA experiment is namely about twice as deep as the ANAIS and COSINE-100 experiments, so that there is longer passage time for DAMA, which thus gets more excited dark matter particles. The xenon-scintillator experiments have their strong limits for dark matter making itself felt via nucleus recoils, and thus we can just assume that the excited dark matter mainly emits e.g. electrons, and the xenon-experiments would hardly see such dark matter. The single event recently seen by LUX/ZEPPELIN could be due to a low rate of nucleus emission in addition to the hypothesised electrons.
ER -