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

Itay M. Bloch1,2, Ana M. Botti3,4, Mariano Cababie5,6,3, Gustavo Cancelo3, Brenda A. Cervantes-Vergara7, Miguel Daal8, Ansh Desai9, Alex Drlica-Wagner3,4,10, Rouven Essig11 et al. (SENSEI Collaboration)

Rouven Essig11, Juan Estrada3, Erez Etzion8, Guillermo Fernandez Moroni3, Stephen E. Holland12, Jonathan Kehat8, Ian Lawson13, Steffon Luoma13, Aviv Orly8, Santiago E. Perez3,14,15, Dario Rodrigues14,15, Nathan A. Saffold3, Silvia Scorza16, Miguel Sofo-Haro3,17, Kelly Stifter3, Javier Tiffenberg3, Sho Uemura3, Edgar Marrufo Villalpando4, Tomer Volansky8, Federico Winkel14,15, Yikai Wu11,18, Tien-Tien Yu9, and Xavier Bertou19 (SENSEI Collaboration)

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 211001 – Published 27 May, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/1gpp-3tqd

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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Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 211001– Published 27 May, 2026
  • Received 13 November 2025
  • Accepted 2 April 2026
Article part of CHORUS
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