Related papers: Dark matter - electron interactions in materials b…
Detection of electron recoils by dark matter (DM) may reveal the structure of the dark sector. We consider a scenario where a heavier DM particle inelastically scatters off an electron and is converted into a lighter DM particle. A small…
If dark matter (DM) particles are lighter than a few MeV/$c^2$ and can scatter off electrons, their interaction within the solar interior results in a considerable hardening of the spectrum of galactic dark matter received on Earth. For a…
Dark Matter (DM) may belong to a hidden sector that is only feebly interacting with the Standard Model (SM) and may have never been in thermal equilibrium in the Early Universe. In this case, the observed abundance of dark matter particles…
Sub-GeV dark matter (DM) which interacts with electrons can excite electrons occupying molecular orbitals in a scattering event. In particular, aromatic compounds such as benzene or xylene have an electronic excitation energy of a few eV,…
Measuring dark matter (DM) signals via electron recoil provides an important means for direct detection of light DM particles. The recent XENON1T anomaly with electron recoil energy around $\,E_R^{}\!=\!(2-3)$keV can be naturally explained…
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.…
There are currently several existing and proposed experiments designed to probe sub-GeV dark matter (DM) using electron ionization in various materials. The projected signal rates for these experiments assume that this ionization yield…
Astronomical and cosmological observations indicate that dark matter should interact very weakly with the electromagnetic radiation. Nevertheless, the existence of such interactions is not precluded by observations nor by theoretical…
Dark matter detectors built primarily to probe elastic scattering of WIMPs on nuclei are also precise probes of light, weakly coupled particles that may be absorbed by the detector material. In this paper, we derive constraints on the…
The Standard Model of Fundamental Interactions (SM) represents one of the most precise theories in physics. Among the predictions of the SM we find, for instance, the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron $a_e = 0.001159652181643(764)$.…
Semiconductors with $\mathcal{O}(\text{meV})$ band gaps have been shown to be promising targets to search for sub-MeV mass dark matter (DM). In this paper we focus on a class of materials where such narrow band gaps arise naturally as a…
Inelastic dark matter (IDM) models feature an energy threshold for scattering with Standard Model particles, which enables their consistency with the increasingly stringent limits placed by direct detection experiments. In a typical…
We calculate the scattering rate of sub-GeV dark matter in solid-state targets for spin-dependent dark matter -- nucleon interactions. For dark matter particles with mass below 100 MeV, the scattering occurs predominantly through incoherent…
A neutral dark matter particle may possess an electric dipole moment (EDM) or a magnetic dipole moment (MDM), so that its scattering with nuclei is governed by electromagnetic interactions. If the moments are associated with relevant…
In interacting multi-component dark matter (DM) models, if the DM components are nearly degenerate in mass and the interactions between them are strong enough, the relatively heavy DM components can be converted into lighter ones at late…
We reinterpret the results of the direct searches for dark matter in terms of composite dark matter, i.e. dark matter particles that form neutral bound states, generically called dark atoms, either with ordinary particles, or with other…
We consider the direct detection of dark matter (DM) with polar materials, where single production of optical or acoustic phonons gives excellent reach to scattering of sub-MeV DM for both scalar and vector mediators. Using Density…
While most scintillation-based dark matter experiments search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), a sub-GeV WIMP-like particle may also be detectable in these experiments. While dark matter of this type and scale would not…
In this Letter we revisit general dark matter (DM)-bound-electron interactions studied previously in the influential work [R. Catena {\it et al.,} Atomic responses to general dark matter-electron interactions, Phys. Rev. Res. 2, 033195…
We consider the possibility to detect cosmic light dark matter (DM), i.e., axions and dark photons, of mass $\sim 10^{-6}$ eV and $\sim 10^{-4}$ eV, by magnetic excitation in a magnet with strong hyperfine interaction. In particular, we…