Itay M. Bloch, Ana Martina Botti, Mariano Cababié, Gustavo Cancelo, Brenda A. Cervantes-Vergara, M. Daal, Ansh Desai, A. Drlica-Wagner, Rouven Essig, J. Estrada, E. Etzion, Guillermo Fernández Moroni, S. Holland, Jonathan Kehat, Ian Lawson, Steffon Luoma, Aviv Orly, Santiago E. Perez, Darío Rodrigues, Nathan Saffold, S. Scorza, Miguel Sofo-Haro, Kelly Stifter, Javier Tiffenberg, Sho Uemura, Edgar Marrufo Villalpando, Tomer Volansky, Federico Winkel, Yikai Wu, T. Yu, X. Bertou
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.