On dark matter search after DAMA with Ge-73

Abstract

The Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) is one of the main candidates for the relic dark matter (DM).In the effective low-energy minimal supersymmetric standard model (effMSSM) the neutralino-nucleon spin and scalar cross sections in the low-mass regime were calculated. The calculated cross sections are compared with almost all experimental currently available exclusion curves for spin-dependent WIMP-proton and WIMP-neutron cross sections. It is demonstrated that in general about two-orders-of-magnitude improvement of the current DM experiment sensitivities is needed to reach the (effMSSM) SUSY predictions. At the current level of accuracy it looks reasonable to safely neglect sub-dominant spin WIMP-nucleon contributions analyzing the data from spin-non-zero targets. To avoid misleading discrepancies between data and SUSY calculations it is, however, preferable to use a mixed spin-scalar coupling approach.This approach is applied to estimate future prospects of experiments with the odd-neutron high-spin isotope Ge-73. It is noticed that the DAMA evidence favors the light Higgs sector in the effMSSM, a high event rate in a Ge-73 detector and relatively high upgoing muon fluxes from relic neutralino annihilations in the Earth and the Sun.

Comments: 29 pages, 12 figures, 124 references