The Directional Rate and the Modulation Effect for Direct Supersymmetric Dark Matter Detection

Abstract

The detection of the theoretically expected dark matter is central to particle physics and cosmology. Current fashionable supersymmetric models provide a natural dark matter candidate which is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). Such models combined with fairly well understood physics like the quark substructure of the nucleon and the nuclear structure (form factor and/or spin response function), permit the evaluation of the event rate for LSP-nucleus elastic scattering. The thus obtained event rates are, however, very low. So it is imperative to exploit the modulation effect, i.e. the dependence of the event rate on the earth's annual motion. Also it is useful to consider the directional rate, i.e its dependence on the direction of the recoiling nucleus. In this paper we study the modulation effect both in non directional and directional experiments. We calculate both the differential and the total rates usingi both isothermal, symmetric as well as only axially asymmetric, and non isothermal, due to caustic rings, velocity distributions. We consider We find that in the symmetric case the modulation amplitude is small. The same is true for the case of caustic rings. The inclusion of asymmetry, with a enhanced velocity dispersion in the galactocentric direction, yields an enhanced modulation effect, especially in directional experiments.