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Updated: Jun 14, 2026

Digital Inline Holographic Microscopy (DIHM) of Weakly-scattering Subjects
Published on: February 8, 2014
SENSEI: A Search for Diurnal Modulation in Sub-GeV Dark Matter Scattering
Itay M Bloch1,2, Ana M Botti3,4, Mariano Cababie3,5,6
1University of California, Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
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.
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