Semiconductor Probes of Light Dark Matter
By P. Graham, D. Kaplan, S. Rajendran, Matthew T. Walters. 2012
199 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 significantly lowered thresholds. This would allow detection of dark matter as light as an MeV in mass. Compared to other detection technologies, semiconductors allow enhanced sensitivity because of their low ionization energy around an eV. Such detectors would be particularly sensitive to dark matter with electric and magnetic dipole moments, with a reach many orders of magnitude beyond current bounds. Observable dipole moment interactions can be generated by new particles with masses as great as 1000 TeV, providing a window to scales beyond the reach of current colliders.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d9e47cf071c8b4adf64cb8a2d7b15f47dcb13ce
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Citations in the corpus
- The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints (2017, methodology): “Additional possible methods for detecting sub-GeV DM include semiconductors [63, 64], superconductors [65–67], scintillating targets [68], superfluid helium [69, 70], chemical-bond breaking [71], two-dimensional targets [72–74], color center production in crystals [75], molecular spectroscopy [76], ”
- Constraining light dark matter with diffuse X-ray and gamma-ray observations (2013, background): “Such DM can be probed at colliders [10–15], at direct detection experiments [9, 16, 17], and at proton- and electron-beam dumps [18–23].”
- Modulation Effects in Dark Matter-Electron Scattering Experiments (2015, methodology): “We are interested in the directionally-averaged rate, for which the variability of the initial bound-state energy Eb with k may be captured by the valence-band density of states ρ(Eb) (see, for example, [19]); the total differential event rate is then obtained by integrating over all binding energie”
- Direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter with semiconductor targets (2015, methodology): “We note that there are some differences between our results and those in [9, 25].”
- Direct detection of strongly interacting sub-GeV dark matter via electron recoils (2019, background): “One of the ways around this problem is to look for electron recoils and other signals induced by sub-GeV DM in various materials [4–33].”
- SIMP spectroscopy (2015, background): “For light dark matter of order hundreds of MeV, scattering off an electron will typically deposit mev 2 halo ' 100 eV energy, and can excite electrons in a semiconductor above the band gap, leading to a detectable signal [56, 57].”
- Directional detection of dark matter with two-dimensional targets (2016, background): “However, a smaller energy deposit can up-scatter valence electrons in semiconductors with band gaps ∼1 eV [22,25].”
- Light dark matter: Models and constraints (2017, background): “The leptophilic scalar model can be probed by superconductors [45,46], Dirac materials [48], liquid xenon [42,110], graphene [43], scintillators [44], and semiconductor detectors [40,41,111,112], among others [55].”