The Directional Dark Matter Detector (D³)

¹ University of Hawaii, 2505 Correa Road, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
² Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Abstract

Gas-filled Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) with Gas Electron Multipliers (GEMs) and pixels appear suitable for direction-sensitive WIMP dark matter searches. We present the background and motivation for our work on this technology, past and ongoing prototype work, and a development path towards an affordable, 1-m³-scale directional dark matter detector, D³. Such a detector may be particularly suitable for low-mass WIMP searches, and perhaps sufficiently sensitive to clearly determine whether the signals seen by DAMA, CoGeNT, and CRESST-II are due to low-mass WIMPs or background.