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Published March 1, 2020 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Multichannel direct detection of light dark matter: Target comparison

Abstract

Direct-detection experiments for light dark matter are making enormous leaps in reaching previously unexplored model space. Several recent proposals rely on collective excitations, where the experimental sensitivity is highly dependent on detailed properties of the target material, well beyond just nucleus mass numbers as in conventional searches. It is thus important to optimize the target choice when considering which experiment to build. We carry out a comparative study of target materials across several detection channels, focusing on electron transitions and single (acoustic or optical) phonon excitations in crystals, as well as the traditional nuclear recoils. We compare materials currently in use in nuclear recoil experiments (Si, Ge, NaI, CsI, CaWO₄), a few of which have been proposed for light dark matter experiments (GaAs, Al₂O₃, diamond), as well as 16 other promising polar crystals across all detection channels. We find that target- and dark-matter-model-dependent reach is largely determined by a small number of material parameters: speed of sound, electronic band gap, mass number, Born effective charge, high-frequency dielectric constant, and optical phonon energies. We showcase, for each of the two benchmark models, an exemplary material that has a better reach than in any currently proposed experiment.

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 5 November 2019; accepted 28 January 2020; published 4 March. We thank Kyle Bystrom, Rouven Essig, Matt Pyle, Adrian Soto, and Tien-Tien Yu for useful discussions. T. T. and K. Z. are supported by the Quantum Information Science Enabled Discovery (QuantISED) for High Energy Physics (KA2401032) at LBNL. Z. Z. is supported by the NSF Grant No. PHY-1638509 and DoE Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Development of the materials calculations in this paper (S. G. and K. I.) was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of LBNL under the DoE Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Computational resources were provided by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and the Molecular Foundry, DoE Office of Science User Facilities supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The work performed at the Molecular Foundry was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under the same contract.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevD.101.055004.pdf

Submitted - 1910.10716.pdf

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Additional details

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