Modulation Effects in Dark Matter-Electron Scattering Experiments
By Samuel C. K. Lee, M. Lisanti, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, B. Safdi. 2015
133 citations recorded by the source corpus.
One of the next frontiers in dark-matter direct-detection experiments is to explore the MeV to GeV mass regime. Such light dark matter does not carry enough kinetic energy to produce an observable nuclear recoil, but it can scatter off electrons, leading to a measurable signal. We introduce a semi-analytic approach to characterize the resulting electron-scattering events in atomic and semiconductor targets, improving on previous analytic proposals that underestimate the signal at high recoil energies. We then use this procedure to study the time-dependent properties of the electron-scattering signal, including the modulation fraction, higher-harmonic modes and modulation phase. The time dependence can be distinct in a non-trivial way from the nuclear scattering case. Additionally, we show that dark-matter interactions inside the Earth can significantly distort the lab-frame phase-space distribution of sub-GeV dark matter.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c19738ab8fafb63c8b6170ab00ee211e52bf5582
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
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Citations in the corpus
- Directional detection of dark matter with two-dimensional targets (2016, background): “Also plotted are the analogous curves for germanium [26] with 1-electron (solid purple) and 5-electron (dashed purple) thresholds”
- 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].”
- Direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter with semiconductor targets (2015, methodology): “[68] finds increasingly higher rates than us at increasingly higher recoil energies.”
- 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].”