Directional detection of dark matter with two-dimensional targets

By Y. Hochberg, Y. Kahn, M. Lisanti, C. Tully, K. Zurek. 2016

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose two-dimensional materials as targets for direct detection of dark matter. Using graphene as an example, we focus on the case where dark matter scattering deposits sufficient energy on a valence-band electron to eject it from the target. We show that the sensitivity of graphene to dark matter of MeV to GeV mass can be comparable, for similar exposure and background levels, to that of semiconductor targets such as silicon and germanium. Moreover, a two-dimensional target is an excellent directional detector, as the ejected electron retains information about the angular dependence of the incident dark matter particle. This proposal can be implemented by the PTOLEMY experiment, presenting for the first time an opportunity for directional detection of sub-GeV dark matter.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Radiation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7257309e2b2fe941f9074a790aa8d8751472ac2

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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. S. Pastor
8. C. Kouvaris

In Radiation

1. K. Zurek
2. Tongyan Lin
3. S. Pastor
4. Stefano Gariazzo
5. Roberto Trotta
6. Julien Lesgourgues

Citations in the corpus

• 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].”
• Neutrino physics with the PTOLEMY project: active neutrino properties and the light sterile case (2019, background): “For example, it has been suggested that targets of graphene layers or nanotubes could be used for directional detection of dark matter candidates with mass in the MeV range [19, 20].”
• 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].”
• Detection of sub-MeV dark matter with three-dimensional Dirac materials (2017, background): “For many such systems, including semiconductors [44–46], graphene [47], scintillators [48], molecules [49], and crystal lattices [50], Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.”