Related papers: Dark Matter Detection Using Phonon Sensing in Amor…
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…
A well-motivated class of dark matter candidates, including axions and dark photons, takes the form of coherent oscillations of a light bosonic field. If the dark matter couples to Standard Model states, it may be possible to detect it via…
The search for low-mass dark matter (DM) goes in parallel with the identification of new detection channels and the development of suitable detectors. Detection of the resulting small energy depositions is challenging: it requires extremely…
We propose a new class of bosonic dark matter (DM) detectors based on resonant absorption onto a gas of small polyatomic molecules. Bosonic DM acts on the molecules as a narrow-band perturbation, like an intense but weakly coupled laser.…
Collective excitations in condensed matter systems, such as phonons and magnons, have recently been proposed as novel detection channels for light dark matter. We show that excitation of i) optical phonon polaritons in polar materials in an…
We revisit the calculation of bosonic dark matter absorption via electronic excitations. Working in an effective field theory framework and consistently taking into account in-medium effects, we clarify the relation between dark matter and…
We show that axion dark matter in the range meV $\lesssim m_a\lesssim$ 100 meV can incoherently excite phonons in crystal targets with unpolarised nuclear spins. This can occur through its coupling to nuclear spins and/or through its…
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…
We show that polar materials are excellent targets for direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter due to the presence of gapped optical phonons as well as acoustic phonons with high sound speed. We take the example of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs),…
Detection mechanisms for low mass bosonic dark matter candidates, such the axion or hidden photon, leverage potential interactions with electromagnetic fields, whereby the dark matter (of unknown mass) on rare occasion converts into a…
Single phonon excitations, with energies in the $1-100 \, \text{meV}$ range, are a powerful probe of light dark matter (DM). Utilizing effective field theory, we derive a framework to compute DM absorption rates into single phonons starting…
Detection of axion dark matter heavier than a meV is hindered by its small wavelength, which limits the useful volume of traditional experiments. This problem can be avoided by directly detecting in-medium excitations, whose $\sim…
Dark photons with masses in the 1-100 eV range can be produced in the Sun and subsequently absorbed in terrestrial detectors, offering a promising avenue for probing hidden-sector physics beyond the Standard Model. In this work, we develop…
Semiconductors are by now well-established targets for direct detection of MeV to GeV dark matter via scattering off electrons. We show that semiconductor targets can also detect significantly lighter dark matter via an absorption process.…
We propose the use of several unconventional materials as detectors for dark matter with mass beneath the MeV scale. These include the transition-metal dichalcogenide TiSe$_2$ hosting a low-energy plasmon in the charge-density-wave phase,…
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…
Light dark matter candidates such as axions and dark photons generically couple to electromagnetism, yielding dark-matter-to-photon conversion as a key search strategy. In addition to resonant conversion in cavities and circuits, light dark…
In recent years, theoretical and experimental interest in dark matter (DM) candidates have shifted focus from primarily Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) to an entire suite of candidates with masses from the zeV-scale to the…
Generically, the effective coupling between the dark matter and an atom scales with the number of constituents in the atom, resulting in the effective coupling being proportional to the mass of the atom. In this limit, when the momentum…
We propose hexagonal ice (H$_2$O) as a new target for light dark matter (DM) direct detection. Ice, a polar material, is suitable for single phonon detection through DM scattering for which we consider light dark photon and light scalar…