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

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 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 constrain the amplitude of a general daily modulation signal to be below 6.8 electrons per gram per day.