We propose hydrogenated carbon structures as targets with a remarkable sensitivity to dark matter-nucleon interactions, in the mass range between the 1 MeV and 100 MeV. The ejection of a proton following the interaction with a dark matter particle is a quasi-elastic process, with an extremely small energy threshold, and a clear experimental signature. The proposed detectors are simple, technologically ready, and inexpensive. Yet, they can be considerably more sensitive than current experiments. They also allow strong directionality, to be used towards efficient background rejection.
@article{arxiv.2602.02694,
title = {Hydrogenated carbon structures as directional sub-GeV dark matter detectors},
author = {Tomás Arias and Antonino Bellinvia and Gianluca Cavoto and Angelo Esposito and Francesco Pandolfi and Guglielmo Papiri and Antonio D. Polosa and Tyler Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.02694},
year = {2026}
}