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CDMs results

Posted: December 17 2009
by Anze Slosar
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...

CDMs results

Posted: December 18 2009
by Anze Slosar
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...

Re: CDMs results

Posted: December 18 2009
by Antony Lewis
Seems right.. I missed the webcast but found

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

Re: CDMs results

Posted: December 18 2009
by Boud Roukema
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