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obscura - Direct detection of dark matter with nucleus and electron recoil experiments

DOI JOSS paper

A modular C++ tool and library for dark matter direct detection computations for both nuclear and electron recoil experiments.

The purpose of this documentation or manual is to provide insight into the polymorphic class structure of obscura and how it can be applied in different contexts. It should also serve as a guide and describe the usage of obscura via code examples.

The documentation does not contain a review of the physics implemented in the library. For more physics details, we refer to e.g. chapter 3 of [Emken2019] or [Nobile2021].

If you want to contribute to obscura, please check out the contribution guidelines.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/temken/obscura/main/paper/FlowChart.png

For the interpretation of past and future direct searches for DM particles, it is important to be able to provide accurate predictions for event rates and spectra under a variety of possible and viable assumptions in a computationally efficient way. While there exists a few tools to compute DM induced nuclear recoil spectra, such as DDCalc or WimPyDD, obscura is not limited to nuclear targets. Instead its main focus lies on sub-GeV DM searches probing electron recoils which typically requires methods from atomic and condensed matter physics, see e.g. [Essig2012] or [Catena2019]. In the context of sub-GeV DM searches, new ideas such as target materials or detection techniques are being proposed regularly, and the theoretical modelling of these are getting improved continuosly. At the same time, currently running experiments continue to publish their results and analyses, setting increasingly strict bounds on the DM parameter space. In such a dynamic field, obscura can be an invaluable tool due to its high level of adaptability and facilitate and accelerate the development of new, reliable research software for the preparation of a DM discovery in the hopefully near future.