Theoretical Rates for Direct Detection of SUSY Dark Matter

Abstract

Exotic dark matter together with the vacuum energy (associated with the cosmological constant) seem to dominate in the Universe. Thus its direct detection is central to particle physics and cosmology. Supersymmetry provides a natural dark matter candidate, the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). Furtheremore from the knowlegde of the density and velocity distribution of the LSP, the quark substructure of the nucleon and the nuclear structure (form factor and/or spin response function), one is able to evaluate the event rate for LSP-nucleus elastic scattering. The thus obtained event rates are, however, very low. So it is imperative to exploit the modulation effect, i.e. the dependence of the event rate on the Earth's motion and the directional signature, i.e. the dependence of the rate on the direction of the recoiling nucleus. In this paper we study such experimental signatures employng a supersymmetric model with universal boundary conditions at large tangent beta.