Related papers: Multiphonon excitations from dark matter scatterin…
Dark matter is five times more abundant than ordinary visible matter in our Universe. While laboratory searches hunting for dark matter have traditionally focused on the electroweak scale, theories of low mass hidden sectors motivate new…
We show that polar materials are excellent targets for direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter due to the presence of gapped optical phonons as well as acoustic phonons with high sound speed. We take the example of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs),…
The Migdal effect inside detectors provides a new possibility of probing the sub-GeV dark matter (DM) particles. While there has been well-established methods treating the Migdal effect in isolated atoms, a coherent and complete description…
Semiconductors are by now well-established targets for direct detection of MeV to GeV dark matter via scattering off electrons. We show that semiconductor targets can also detect significantly lighter dark matter via an absorption process.…
Single phonon excitations are sensitive probes of light dark matter in the keV-GeV mass window. For anisotropic target materials, the signal depends on the direction of the incoming dark matter wind and exhibits a daily modulation. We…
Generically, the effective coupling between the dark matter and an atom scales with the number of constituents in the atom, resulting in the effective coupling being proportional to the mass of the atom. In this limit, when the momentum…
Resonance Raman scattering, which probes electrons, phonons and their interplay in crystals, is extensively used in two-dimensional materials. Here we investigate Raman modes in MoSe$_2$ at different laser excitation energies from 2.33 eV…
Phonon, the collective excitation of lattice vibration in the crystal, has been put forward as a means to search for light dark matter. However, the accurate modeling of the multi-phonon production process is challenging in theory. The…
We study the response of a He-4 detector to the interaction of sub-GeV dark matter using an effective field theory for the superfluid. We compute the lifetime of the phonon, which agrees with what known from standard techniques, hence…
Multi-phonon Raman scattering in semiconductor nanocrystals is treated taking into account both adiabatic and non-adiabatic phonon-assisted optical transitions. Because phonons of various symmetries are involved in scattering processes,…
Dark matter (DM) scattering with nuclei in solid-state systems may produce elastic nuclear recoil at high energies and single-phonon excitation at low energies. When the dark matter momentum is comparable to the momentum spread of nuclei…
Collective excitations in condensed matter systems, such as phonons and magnons, have recently been proposed as novel detection channels for light dark matter. We show that excitation of i) optical phonon polaritons in polar materials in an…
Various dark matter search experiments employ phonon-based crystal detectors operated at cryogenic temperatures. Some of these detectors, including certain silicon detectors used by the SuperCDMS Collaboration, are able to achieve…
Dark matter scattering off a nucleus has a small probability of inducing an observable ionization through the inelastic excitation of an electron, called the Migdal effect. We use an effective field theory to extend the computation of the…
We present a first calculation of the rate for plasmon production in semiconductors from nuclei recoiling against dark matter. The process is analogous to bremsstrahlung of transverse photon modes, but with a longitudinal plasmon mode…
We propose a new method to detect sub-GeV dark matter, through their scatterings from free leptons and the resulting kinematic shifts. Specially, such an experiment can detect dark matter interacting solely with muons. The experiment…
A number of direct detection experiments are searching for electron excitations created by scattering of sub-GeV dark matter. We present an alternate formulation of dark matter-electron scattering in terms of the dielectric response of a…
Dark matter with mass below about a GeV is essentially unobservable in conventional direct detection experiments. However, newly proposed technology will allow the detection of single electron events in semiconductor materials with…
Direct detection of nuclear scatterings of sub-GeV Dark Matter (DM) particles favors low-Z nuclei. Hydrogen nucleus, which has a single proton, provides the best kinematic match to a light dark matter particle. The characteristic nuclear…
While there is much indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter (DM), to date it has evaded detection. Current efforts focus on DM masses over $\sim$GeV -- to push the sensitivity of DM searches to lower masses, new DM targets and…