Related papers: Crystal Defects: A Portal To Dark Matter Detection
Directional detection is a promising Dark Matter search strategy. Even though it could accommodate to a sizeable background contamination, electron/recoil discrimination remains a key and challenging issue as for direction-insensitive…
The dark photon is a new gauge boson that naturally arises in many beyond the Standard Model theoretical models, featuring interactions that resemble quantum electrodynamics. Due to this feature, it is often considered the portal between…
We hypothesize that avalanche-like releases of energy accumulated in materials due to radioactivity and other sources can produce parasitic background in dark matter particles searches and low-energy threshold detectors. We explore this…
Indirect detection is the search for the particle nature of dark matter with astrophysical probes. Manifestly, it exists right at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics, and the discovery potential for dark matter can be…
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…
The CRESST experiment aims at the direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter particles via elastic scattering off nuclei in different target crystals at cryogenic temperatures. The advancement in W-TES sensors allowed the CRESST detectors to…
The presence of dark matter has been ascertained through a wealth of astrophysical and cosmological phenomena and its nature is a central puzzle in modern science. Elementary particles stand as the most compelling explanation. They have…
The primary observable in dark matter direct detection is the spectrum of scattering events. We simulate multiple positive direct detection signals (on germanium, xenon, and argon targets) to explore the extent to which the underlying…
A pressureless dark matter component fits well with several cosmological observations. However, there are indications that cold dark matter may encounter challenges in explaining observations at small scales, particularly at galactic…
Nuclear recoils in crystal detectors generate radiation damage in the form of crystal defects that can be measured in scientific-grade CCDs as local hot spots of leakage current stimulated by temperature increases in the devices. In this…
In direct dark matter detection experiments, conventional elastic scattering of WIMPs results in exponentially falling recoil spectra. In contrast, theories of WIMPs with excited states can lead to nuclear recoil spectra that peak at finite…
We investigate the detection of composite dark matter that disassembles into a cascade while crossing the Earth. This occurs for loosely bound composite dark matter, where the binding energy per constituent is small, such that scattering…
Directional detection can provide unambiguous observation of Dark Matter interactions even in presence of insidious backgrounds. The DM-TPC collaboration is developing a detector with the goal of measuring the direction and sense of nuclear…
Dark Matter (DM) comprising particles in the mass range of a few MeV to GeV is waiting to be explored, given the many theoretical models accommodating cosmological abundance. We hereby propose an experiment with the LHC proton beam of 7 TeV…
An observation of the anisotropy of dark matter interactions in a direction-sensitive detector would provide decisive evidence for the discovery of galactic dark matter. Directional information would also provide a crucial input to…
We explore a new low-threshold direct-detection concept for dark matter, based on the breaking of chemical bonds between atoms. This includes the dissociation of molecules and the creation of defects in a lattice. With thresholds of a few…
We estimate the event rate for excitation of atomic transition by photino-like dark matter. For excitations of several eV, this event rate can exceed naive cross-section by many orders of magnitude. Although the event rate for these atomic…
Organic scintillators are widely used for fast neutron detection and spectroscopy. Several effects complicate the interpretation of results from detectors based upon these materials. First, fast neutrons will often leave a detector before…
Direction-sensitive WIMP dark matter searches may help overcome the challenges faced by direct dark matter detection experiments. In particular, directional detectors should be able to clearly differentiate a dark matter signal from…
Dark matter direct detection searches for signals coming from dark matter scattering against nuclei at a very low recoil energy scale ~ 10 keV. In this paper, a simple non-relativistic effective theory is constructed to describe…