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Published January 1, 2018 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Detection of sub-MeV dark matter with three-dimensional Dirac materials

Abstract

We propose the use of three-dimensional Dirac materials as targets for direct detection of sub-MeV dark matter. Dirac materials are characterized by a linear dispersion for low-energy electronic excitations, with a small band gap of O(meV) if lattice symmetries are broken. Dark matter at the keV scale carrying kinetic energy as small as a few meV can scatter and excite an electron across the gap. Alternatively, bosonic dark matter as light as a few meV can be absorbed by the electrons in the target. We develop the formalism for dark matter scattering and absorption in Dirac materials and calculate the experimental reach of these target materials. We find that Dirac materials can play a crucial role in detecting dark matter in the keV to MeV mass range that scatters with electrons via a kinetically mixed dark photon, as the dark photon does not develop an in-medium effective mass. The same target materials provide excellent sensitivity to absorption of light bosonic dark matter in the meV to hundreds of meV mass range, superior to all other existing proposals when the dark matter is a kinetically mixed dark photon.

Additional Information

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3. (Received 10 September 2017; published 8 January 2018) We thank Jens H. Bardarson, Ilya Belopolski, Rouven Essig, Snir Gazit, Zahid Hasan, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, and Zohar Ringel for useful conversations. Y. H. is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Grant No. NSF-PHY-1419008, the LHC Theory Initiative, by the Israel Science Foundation, by the Binational Science Foundation, by the I-CORE Program of the Planning Budgeting Committee and by the Azrieli Foundation. M. L. is supported by the DOE under Contract No. DESC0007968, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Cottrell Scholar Program through the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. K. M. Z. is supported by the DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. A. G. G. was supported by the Marie Curie Programme under EC Grant No. 653846. S. M. G., Z.-F. L., S. F. W. and J. B. N. are supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This work is also supported by the Molecular Foundry through the DOE, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under the same contract number. S. F. W. is supported in part by a NDSEG fellowship. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. This work was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY-1607611.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevD.97.015004.pdf

Submitted - 1708.08929.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023