Related papers: Crystal Defects: A Portal To Dark Matter Detection

Recent progress in phonon-mediated detectors with eV-scale nuclear recoil energy sensitivity requires an understanding of the effect of the crystalline defects on the energy spectrum expected from dark matter or neutrino coherent…

The threshold displacement energy in solid state detector materials varies from several eV to ~100 eV. If a stable or long lived defect is created as a result of a nuclear recoil event, some part of the recoil energy is stored in the…

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…

The scattering of sub-GeV dark matter in direct detection experiments happens at characteristic wavelengths comparable or larger than the interparticle spacing. Collective effects in the target material must therefore be accounted for when…

We propose a new low-threshold direct-detection concept for dark matter and for coherent nuclear scattering of solar neutrinos, based on the dissociation of atoms and subsequent creation of color center type defects within a lattice. The…

We revisit the detection of luminous dark matter in direct detection experiments. In this scenario, dark matter scatters endothermically to produce an excited state, which decays to produce a photon. We explore ways in which the electron…

Solid-state phonon and charge detectors probe the scattering of weakly interacting particles, such as dark matter and neutrinos, through their low recoil thresholds. Recent advancements have pushed sensitivity to eV-scale energy…

The sensitivity to dark matter signals at neutrino experiments is fundamentally challenged by the neutrino rates, as they leave similar signatures in their detectors. As a way to improve the signal sensitivity, we investigate a dark matter…

We use a formalism that describes electron ejections from graphene-like targets by dark matter (DM) scattering for general forms of scalar and spin 1/2 DM-electron interactions in combination with state-of-the-art density functional…

In this thesis, I study the expected direct and indirect detection signals of dark matter. More precisely, I study three aspects of dark matter; I use hydrodynamic simulations to extract properties of weakly interacting dark matter that are…

Sodium iodide (NaI) is a widely used scintillator in direct dark matter searches. In particular, NaI-based cryogenic scintillating calorimeters have emerged as promising candidates, like in the COSINUS experiment, for testing the annually…

Dark matter direct detection experiments are designed to look for the scattering of dark matter particles that are assumed to move with virial velocities $\sim 10^{-3}$. At these velocities, the energy deposition in the detector is large…

We extend the calculation of dark matter direct detection rates via electronic transitions in general dielectric crystal targets, combining state-of-the-art density functional theory calculations of electronic band structures and wave…

We show that the rate for dark matter-electron scattering in an arbitrary material is determined by an experimentally measurable quantity, the complex dielectric function, for any dark matter interaction that couples to electron density.…

Direct detection dark matter experiments have proven to be compelling probes for studying low-energy neutrino interactions with both nuclei and atomic electrons, offering complementary information to accelerator and reactor-based neutrino…

In the past decades, several detector technologies have been developed with the quest to directly detect dark matter interactions and to test one of the most important unsolved questions in modern physics. The sensitivity of these…

Solid state athermal phonon calorimeters used in the search for low mass dark matter or coherent neutrino-nucleus interactions have long observed a large excess of events below several hundred eV. The relaxation of damage created by the…

In a seminal paper now a decade old, it was shown that dark matter detectors geared at probing interactions with nucleons could also be used to probe dark matter interactions with electrons. In this work, we show that new detector concepts…

We examine the signals produced by dark matter interactions with electrons, which play a crucial role in direct detection experiments employing heavy target materials, particularly in many well-motivated sub-GeV dark matter scenarios. When…

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…