Recent results in the search for dark matter with noble liquid detectors
  The field of dark matter direct detection has seen important contributions in
recent years from experiments involving liquid noble gases, specifically liquid
argon and liquid xenon. These detection media offer many properties deemed
useful in this search, including fast scintillation response, charge readout,
3-D position reconstruction, and nuclear recoil discrimination. Part of the
very rapid emergence and dominance of noble liquids is due to the fact that
these technologies are easily scalable to nearly arbitrary size and mass.
However, the physics impact of recent results has called into question our
understanding of the low-energy response of these detection media, in light of
apparent contradictions with a possible low-mass WIMP signal observed in the
DAMA/LIBRA and CoGeNT experiments. I discuss recent results and examine the
details of this inconsistency.
