A new halo-independent approach to dark matter direct detection analysis

Uncertainty in the local dark matter velocity distribution is a key difficulty in the analysis of data from direct detection experiments. Here we propose a new approach for dealing with this uncertainty, which does not involve any assumptions about the structure of the dark matter halo. Given a dark matter model, our method yields the velocity distribution which best describes a set of direct detection data as a finite sum of streams with optimised speeds and densities. The method is conceptually simple and numerically very efficient. We give an explicit example in which the method is applied to determining the ratio of proton to neutron couplings of dark matter from a hypothetical set of future data.

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