SENSEI: A Search for Diurnal Modulation in Sub-GeV Dark Matter Scattering

Physical Review Letters 2026 Open access

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Authors: Itay M. Bloch, Ana Martina Botti, Mariano Cababié, Gustavo I. Cancelo, Brenda A. Cervantes-Vergara, M. Daal, Ansh Desai, A. Drlica-Wagner, Rouven Essig, Juan Estrada, E. Etzion, Guillermo Fernández Moroni
+19 more S. Holland, Jonathan Kehat, Ian Lawson, Steffon Luoma, Aviv Orly, Santiago E. Perez, Darío Rodrigues, Nathan Saffold, S. Scorza, Miguel Sofo-Haro, Kelly Stifter, Javier Tiffenberg, Sho Uemura, Edgar Marrufo Villalpando, Tomer Volansky, Federico Winkel, Yikai Wu, T. Yu, X. Bertou
DOI: 10.1103/1gpp-3tqd
Cited by: 1
References: 50

Abstract

Dark matter particles with sufficiently large interactions with ordinary matter can scatter in the Earth's atmosphere and crust before reaching an underground detector. This Earth-shielding effect can induce a directional dependence in the dark matter flux, leading to a sidereal daily modulation in the signal rate. We perform a search for such a modulation using data from the SENSEI experiment, targeting MeV-scale dark matter. We achieve nearly an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity over previous direct-detection bounds for dark-matter masses below ∼1 MeV, assuming the standard halo model with a Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution, and restrict the amplitude of a general daily modulation signal to be below 6.8 e/g/d.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research

Publication details

Journal / source
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Volume
136
Issue
21
Pages
211001–211001
Publication date
2 April 2026
Language
EN