Detection of light dark matter with optical phonons in polar materials

By S. Knapen, Tongyan Lin, M. Pyle, K. Zurek. Physics Letters B, 2017

209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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), which has the properties needed for experimental realization, and where many results can be estimated analytically. We find GaAs has excellent reach to dark photon absorption, can completely cover the freeze-in benchmark for scattering via an ultralight dark photon, and is competitive with other proposals to detect sub-MeV dark matter scattering off nuclei.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77fcd0ab4a225965c0218135699f4c34dcd57da8

How researchers see this paper

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

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Dark photon dark matter produced by axion oscillations (2018, unknown): “periments such as ADMX [1], a dark matter radio [2], dish antennas [3–8], dielectric haloscopes [9], absorption in various targets [10–18], the use of dark matter detectors as helioscopes [19], and repurposing of gravitational wave detectors [20] as well as other accelerometers [21].”
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].”