XENON10/100 dark matter constraints in comparison with CoGeNT and DAMA: examining the Leff dependence

Abstract

We consider the compatibility of DAMA/LIBRA, CoGeNT, XENON10 and XENON100 results for spin-independent (SI) dark matter Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), particularly at low masses (~ 10 GeV), assuming a standard dark matter halo. The XENON bounds depend on the scintillation efficiency factor Leff for which there is considerable uncertainty. Thus we consider various extrapolations for Leff at low energy. With the Leff measurements we consider, XENON100 results are found to be insensitive to the low energy extrapolation. We find the strongest bounds are from XENON10, rather than XENON100, due to the lower energy threshold. For reasonable choices of Leff and for the case of SI elastic scattering, XENON10 is incompatible with the DAMA/LIBRA 3$σ$ region and severely constrains the 7-12 GeV WIMP mass region of interest published by the CoGeNT collaboration.

23 pages, 9 figures. Version 2: more careful treatment of XENON10 efficiencies, expanded discussion. A response to arXiv:1006.2031 is found in the Appendix