Detecting superlight dark matter with Fermi-degenerate materials

By Y. Hochberg, M. Pyle, Yue Zhao, K. Zurek. 2015

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractWe examine in greater detail the recent proposal of using superconductors for detecting dark matter as light as the warm dark matter limit of O$$ \mathcal{O} $$(keV). Detection of suc light dark matter is possible if the entire kinetic energy of the dark matter is extracted in the scattering, and if the experiment is sensitive to O$$ \mathcal{O} $$(meV) energy depositions. This is the case for Fermi-degenerate materials in which the Fermi velocity exceeds the dark matter velocity dispersion in the Milky Way of ∼ 10−3. We focus on a concrete experimental proposal using a superconducting target with a transition edge sensor in order to detect the small energy deposits from the dark matter scatterings. Considering a wide variety of constraints, from dark matter self-interactions to the cosmic microwave background, we show that models consistent with cosmological/astrophysical and terrestrial constraints are observable with such detectors. A wider range of viable models with dark matter mass below an MeV is available if dark matter or mediator properties (such as couplings or masses) differ at BBN epoch or in stellar interiors from those in superconductors. We also show that metal targets pay a strong in-medium suppression for kinetically mixed mediators; this suppression is alleviated with insulating targets.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/727cffcf2e24c49b81f2cd7b468a55f8931e71b8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Tongyan Lin
2. S. Knapen
3. R. Essig
4. M. Lisanti
5. Y. Hochberg
6. Y. Kahn
7. Mukul Sholapurkar
8. T. Emken

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Tongyan Lin
2. K. Zurek
3. Y. Kahn

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Tongyan Lin
2. S. Knapen
3. K. Zurek
4. Y. Hochberg
5. R. Essig
6. M. Lisanti
7. C. Kouvaris
8. Mukul Sholapurkar

Citations in the corpus

• Directional detection of dark matter with two-dimensional targets (2016, background): “Superconducting targets with ∼meV energy gaps are capable of reaching ∼keV masses [28,29].”
• Detection of sub-MeV dark matter with three-dimensional Dirac materials (2017, methodology): “For comparison, we also show the reach of superconductors with a 1 meV threshold [54] (black), and the projected single-electron reach for a silicon detector with a 1e− threshold [89] (blue dotted).”
• Dark matter models and direct detection (2019, methodology): “There are proposals to use superconductors [176, 177, 178] and Dirac materials [179], both of which have a gap of around ∼ meV and have long lived quasiparticle excitations.”
• Light dark matter: Models and constraints (2017, background): “[46,60], while scalar-mediated nucleon couplings have also been discussed in Ref.”
• 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].”