Related papers: Accelerating Composite Dark Matter Discovery with …
The elastic scattering of an atomic nucleus plays a central role in dark matter direct detection experiments. In those experiments, it is usually assumed that the atomic electrons around the nucleus of the target material immediately follow…
Dark matter elastic scattering off nuclei can result in the excitation and ionization of the recoiling atom through the so-called Migdal effect. The energy deposition from the ionization electron adds to the energy deposited by the…
A new dynamic is identified between dark matter and nuclei. Nuclei accelerated to MeV energies by the internal potential of composite dark matter can undergo nuclear fusion. This effect arises in simple models of composite dark matter made…
We study the reach of direct detection experiments for large bound states (containing $10^4$ or more dark nucleons) of Asymmetric Dark Matter. We consider ordinary nuclear recoils, excitation of collective modes (phonons), and electronic…
Dark Matter experiments searching for Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) primarily use nuclear recoils (NRs) in their attempt to detect WIMPs. Migdal-induced electronic recoils (ERs) provide additional sensitivity to light Dark…
Direct dark matter detection experiments based on a liquid xenon target are leading the search for dark matter particles with masses above $\sim$ 5 GeV/c$^2$, but have limited sensitivity to lighter masses because of the small momentum…
Dark matter direct detection experiments have limited sensitivity to light dark matter (below a few GeV), due to the challenges of lowering energy thresholds for the detection of nuclear recoil to below $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{keV})$. While…
Models of nuclear dark matter propose that the dark sector contains large composite states consisting of dark nucleons in analogy to Standard Model nuclei. We examine the direct detection phenomenology of a particular class of nuclear dark…
We investigate loosely bound composite states made of dark matter, where the binding energy for constituent particles is less than the constituent mass. We focus on models of nuclear and molecular dark matter, where constituents are…
We investigate the interactions of large composite dark matter (DM) states with the Standard Model (SM) sector. Elastic scattering with SM nuclei can be coherently enhanced by factors as large as A^2, where A is the number of constituents…
We propose a new mechanism of absorption of dark matter particles in atoms which resembles the Migdal effect of inelastic dark matter scattering. In this process, atom may be ionized upon absorption of a scalar particle through the…
The electron ionization predicted by the Migdal effect in dark matter-nucleus scattering enhances experimental sensitivity to sub-GeV dark matter. In this work, we demonstrate that lower-energy electron excitations provide a novel and…
Dark matter may freeze-out and undergo composite assembly while decoupled from the Standard Model. In this secluded composite scenario, while individual dark matter particles may be too weakly-coupled to detect, the assembled composite can…
Ionization or excitation resulting from the noninstantaneous response of the electron cloud to nuclear recoil is known as the Migdal effect. Dark matter searches utilizing this process set the most stringent bounds on the spin-independent…
The Migdal effect predicts that a nuclear recoil interaction can be accompanied by atomic ionization, allowing many dark matter direct detection experiments to gain sensitivity to sub-GeV masses. We report the first direct search for the…
Mirror dark matter, where dark matter resides in a hidden sector exactly isomorphic to the standard model, can be probed via direct detection experiments by both nuclear and electron recoils if the kinetic mixing interaction exists. In…
Recoil imaging entails the detection of spatially resolved ionization tracks generated by particle interactions. This is a highly sought-after capability in many classes of detector, with broad applications across particle and astroparticle…
We consider searches for the inelastic scattering of low-mass dark matter at direct detection experiments, using the Migdal effect. We find that there are degeneracies between the dark matter mass and the mass splitting that are difficult…
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…
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…