could indicate light dark matter. However a dark matter origin for the CoGeNT events has been refuted by more recent analyses, in favour of an explanation in terms of a background from surface events. Annual modulation is one of the predicted signatures of a WIMP signal, and on this basis the DAMA collaboration has claimed a positive detection. Other groups, however, have not confirmed this result. The CDMS data made public in May 2004 exclude the entire DAMA signal region given certain standard assumptions about the properties of the WIMPs and the dark matter halo, and this has been followed by many other experiments (see Fig 2, right). The COSINE-100 collaboration (a merging of KIMS and DM-Ice groups) published their results on replicating the DAMA/LIBRA signal in December 2018 in journal Nature; their conclusion was that "this result rules out WIMP–nucleon interactions as the cause of the annual modulation observed by the DAMA collaboration". In 2021 new results from COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112 both failed to replicate the DAMA/LIBRA signal and in August 2022 COSINE-100 applied an analysis method similar to one used by DAMA/LIBRA and found a similar annual modulation suggesting the signal could be just a statistical artifact supporting a hypothesis first put forward on 2020. The future of direct detection The 2020s should see the emergence of several multi-tonne mass direct detection experiments, which will probe WIMP-nucleus cross sections orders of magnitude smaller than the current state-of-the-art sensitivity. Examples of such next-generation experiments are LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) and XENONnT, which are multi-tonne liquid xenon experiments, followed by DARWIN, another proposed liquid xenon direct detection experiment of 50–100 tonnes. Such multi-tonne experiments will also face a new background in the form of neutrinos, which will limit their ability to probe the WIMP parameter space beyond a certain point, known as the neutrino floor. However, although its name may imply a hard limit, the neutrino floor represents the region of parameter space beyond which experimental sensitivity can only improve at best as the square root of exposure (the product of detector mass and running time). For WIMP masses below 10 GeV the dominant source of neutrino background is from the Sun, while for higher masses the background contains contributions from atmospheric neutrinos and the diffuse supernova neutrino background. In December 2021, results from PandaX have found no signal in their data, with a lowest excluded cross section of pb at 40