Dark matter direct detection on the Moon

Abstract

Direct searches for dark matter with large-scale noble liquid detectors have become sensitive enough to detect the coherent scattering of local neutrinos. This will become a very challenging background to dark matter discovery in planned future detectors. For dark matter with mass above 10 GeV, the dominant neutrino backgrounds on Earth are atmospheric neutrinos created by cosmic ray collisions with the atmosphere. In contrast, the Moon has almost no atmosphere and nearly all cosmic rays incident on the Moon first collide with the lunar surface, producing a very different neutrino spectrum. In this work we estimate the total flux and spectrum of neutrinos near the surface of the Moon. We then use this to show that a large-scale liquid xenon or argon detector located on the Moon could potentially have significantly greater sensitivity to dark matter compared to an equivalent detector on Earth due to effectively reduced neutrino backgrounds.