Detecting Light Dark Matter with Magnons
Abstract
Scattering of light dark matter with sub-eV energy deposition can be detected with collective excitations in condensed matter systems. When dark matter has spin-independent couplings to atoms or ions, it has been shown to efficiently excite phonons. Here we show that, if dark matter couples to the electron spin, magnon excitations in materials with magnetic dipole order offer a promising detection path. We derive general formulae for single magnon excitation rates from dark matter scattering, and demonstrate as a proof of principle the projected reach of a yttrium iron garnet target for several dark matter models with spin-dependent interactions. This highlights the complementarity of various collective excitations in probing different dark matter interactions.
Additional Information
© 2020 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 1 October 2019; revised manuscript received 3 February 2020; accepted 14 April 2020; published 20 May 2020. We thank Sinéad Griffin, David Hsieh, Matt Pyle, and Mengxing Ye for useful discussions, and Sinéad Griffin, Katherine Inzani, and Thomas Harrelson for collaboration on related work. T. T., Z. Z., and K. Z. are supported by the DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. T. T., Z. Z., and K. Z. were supported by the DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and by the Quantum Information Science Enabled Discovery (QuantISED) for High Energy Physics (Grant No. KA2401032). Z. Z. was also supported by the NSF Grant No. PHY-1638509. We thank the CERN theory group for hospitality where part of this work was completed. Z. Z. and K. Z. also thank the Aspen Center for Physics for hospitality during the completion of this work.Attached Files
Published - PhysRevLett.124.201801.pdf
Submitted - 1905.13744.pdf
Supplemental Material - MagnonI_prl_supplemental.pdf
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- Direct Detection of Light Dark Matter with Magnons
- Eprint ID
- 96325
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190612-124923230
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- KA2401032
- Quantum Information Science Enabled Discovery for High Energy Physics
- PHY-1638509
- NSF
- SCOAP3
- Created
-
2019-06-12Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics