Recoil momentum spectrum in directional dark matter detectors

Abstract

Directional dark matter detectors will be able to record the recoil momentum spectrum of nuclei hit by dark matter WIMPs. We show that the recoil momentum spectrum is the Radon transform of the WIMP velocity distribution. This allows us to obtain analytic expressions for the recoil spectra of a variety of velocity distributions. We comment on the possibility of inverting the recoil momentum spectrum and obtaining the three-dimensional WIMP velocity distribution from data.