Related papers: Directional detection of light dark matter from th…
We consider the scattering of dark matter particles from superfluid liquid $^4$He, which has been proposed as a target for their direct detection. Focusing on dark matter masses below ~1 MeV, we demonstrate from sum-rule arguments 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…
We employ an effective field theory to study the detectability of sub-GeV dark matter through its interaction with the gapless excitations of superfluid helium-4. In a quantum field theory language, the possible interactions between the…
We consider a model of sub-GeV dark matter whose interaction with the Standard Model is mediated by a new vector boson (the dark photon) which couples kinetically to the photon. We describe the possibility of constraining such a model using…
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…
Superfluid ${}^4$He is an ideal candidate for the direct detection of light dark matter via nuclear recoils thanks to its low nuclear mass and the possibility to reach a low detection energy threshold by exploiting the generated…
A promising technology concept for sub-GeV dark matter detection is described, in which low-temperature microcalorimeters serve as the sensors and superfluid $^4$He serves as the target material. A superfluid helium target has several…
We examine in depth a recent proposal to utilize superfluid helium for direct detection of sub-MeV mass dark matter. For sub-keV recoil energies, nuclear scattering events in liquid helium primarily deposit energy into long-lived phonon and…
We show that a two-excitation process in superfluid helium, combined with sensitivity to meV energy depositions, can probe dark matter down to the ~keV warm dark matter mass limit. This mass reach is three orders of magnitude below what can…
We propose a new strategy to directly detect light particle dark matter that has long-ranged interactions with ordinary matter. The approach involves distorting the local flow of dark matter with time-varying fields and measuring these…
Superconducting targets have recently been proposed for the direct detection of dark matter as light as a keV, via elastic scattering off conduction electrons in Cooper pairs. Detecting such light dark matter requires sensitivity to…
Superfluid $^4$He is a promising target material for direct detection of light ($<$ 1 GeV) dark matter. Possible signal channels available for readout in this medium include prompt photons, triplet excimers, and roton and phonon…
The focus of dark matter searches to date has been on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) in the GeV/$c^2$-TeV/$c^2$ mass range. The direct, indirect and collider searches in this mass range have been extensive but ultimately…
Direct searches for light dark matter particles (mass $<10$ GeV) are especially challenging because of the low energies transferred in elastic scattering to typical heavy nuclear targets. We investigate the possibility of using liquid…
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…
Condensed matter materials have shown great potential in searching for light dark matter (DM) via detecting the phonon or magnon signals induced by the scattering of DMs off the materials. In this paper, we study the possibility of…
High-energy photons with $\mathcal{O}$(MeV) energies from radioactive contaminants can scatter in a solid-state target material and constitute an important low-energy background for sub-GeV dark matter direct-detection searches. This…
For direct detection of sub-MeV dark matter, a promising strategy is to search for individual phonon excitations in a crystal. We perform an analytic calculation of the rate for light dark matter (keV $<m_{DM}<$ MeV) to produce two acoustic…
Scattering of light dark matter with sub-eV energy deposition can be detected with collective excitations in condensed matter systems. When dark matter has spin-independent couplings to atoms or ions, it has been shown to efficiently excite…
We propose the Optomechanical Dark-matter INstrument (ODIN), based on a new method for the direct detection of low-mass dark matter. We consider dark matter interacting with superfluid helium in an optomechanical cavity. Using an effective…