Absorption of light dark matter in semiconductors

By Y. Hochberg, Tongyan Lin, K. Zurek. 2016

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Author(s): Hochberg, Y; Lin, T; Zurek, KM | Abstract: © 2017 American Physical Society. 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. When the dark matter mass is above the band gap of the semiconductor (around an eV), absorption proceeds by excitation of an electron into the conduction band. Below the band gap, multiphonon excitations enable absorption of dark matter in the 0.01 eV to eV mass range. Energetic dark matter particles emitted from the sun can also be probed for masses below an eV. We derive the reach for absorption of a relic kinetically mixed dark photon or pseudoscalar in germanium and silicon, and show that existing direct detection results already probe new parameter space. With only a moderate exposure, low-threshold semiconductor target experiments can exceed current astrophysical and terrestrial constraints on sub-keV bosonic dark matter.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3997079a7241cc46752e3a0728a5a2930a5817d

How researchers see this paper

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

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. C. Kouvaris
6. R. Essig
7. M. Lisanti
8. Mukul Sholapurkar

Citations in the corpus

• Dark matter models and direct detection (2019, background): “This idea has been explored in a range of targets [89, 178, 175, 189, 180, 179, 190, 181] for DM down to the∼meV scale, and experiments have recently set direct detection limits on eV-scale DM [172, 191, 171].”
• Detection of sub-MeV dark matter with three-dimensional Dirac materials (2017, background): “III and IV that Dirac materials are more sensitive than superconductors to DM scattering via a dark photon mediator, as well as to absorption of dark photons [51,54].”
• 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], ”
• 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].”
• 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].”
• Light dark matter: Models and constraints (2017, background): “[51] Y.”