The unbearable lightness of being: CDMS versus XENON
  The CDMS-II collaboration has reported 3 events in a Si detector, which are
consistent with being nuclear recoils due to scattering of Galactic dark matter
particles with a mass of about 8.6 GeV and a cross-section on neutrons of about
2 x 10^-41 cm^2. While a previous result from the XENON10 experiment has
supposedly ruled out such particles as dark matter, we find by reanalysing the
XENON10 data that this is not the case. Some tension remains however with the
upper limit placed by the XENON100 experiment, independently of astrophysical
uncertainties concerning the Galactic dark matter distribution. We explore
possible ways of ameliorating this tension by altering the properties of dark
matter interactions. Nevertheless, even with standard couplings, light dark
matter is consistent with both CDMS and XENON10/100.
