CDMs results

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Anze Slosar
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Affiliation: Brookhaven National Laboratory
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CDMs results

Post by Anze Slosar » December 17 2009

Hey,

Most of you probably heard the CDM rumour about the potential WIMP discovery? Three events, etc?

They will be broadcasting today at 2pm (although the b**ds don't say in which time zone, but I guess it is Pacific time, i.e. 5 pm NY, 10pm London, 11pm Paris)

Here it is the link:

http://www-group.slac.stanford.edu/kipac/cdms_live.html

Arxiv will turn into a Vietnam if rumours are true...

Anze Slosar
Posts: 183
Joined: September 24 2004
Affiliation: Brookhaven National Laboratory
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CDMs results

Post by Anze Slosar » December 18 2009

Despite all the blackouts in the streaming, am I correct to understand that their systematic rate is estimated at 0.8+-0.1+-0.2 and with 2 events this can occur by chance in 23% of cases? So less than 2 sigma detection? (Even with three events it'd still be sub 2 sigma... ) A bit disappointing...

Antony Lewis
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Re: CDMs results

Post by Antony Lewis » December 18 2009

Seems right.. I missed the webcast but found

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... ter,_maybe

Boud Roukema
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Affiliation: Institute of Astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus University
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Re: CDMs results

Post by Boud Roukema » December 18 2009

Antony Lewis wrote:Seems right.. I missed the webcast but found

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... ter,_maybe

Let's go to the source: http://cdms.berkeley.edu/

which gives http://cdms.berkeley.edu/results_summary.pdf and http://cdms.berkeley.edu/0912.03592v2.pdf

The ArXiv ref is not yet directly available publicly, but apparently it's already v2. By tomorrow, the paper should be arXiv-ly available at: 0912.3592 . We have to wait until tomorrow to find out the difference between v1 and v2 :P.

From a very superficial glance through the paper, Fig. 3 looks quite impressive. There may be just two events, but they look like extreme events, not members of the tail of a distribution. And Fig. 5 shows a nice common allowed parameter space for WIMP inelastic scattering for DAMA/LIBRA: 100 GeV/c^2 and 80-140 keV mass splittings. DAMA/LIBRA was about 8-9 sigma last time I checked, so if the next generation of CDMS - or Edelweiss - all give a consistent solution, then that would be cool.

Apparently, KIMS should provide confirmation/invalidation of DAMA/LIBRA fairly soon, since it's physically a very similar setup, since CsI should be very similar to NaI: http://q2c.snu.ac.kr/KIMS/KIMS_index.htm

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