Modulation effects in dark matter-electron scattering experiments
Name
PhysRevD.92.083517.pdf
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732.63 KB
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Author(s)
Lee, Samuel K.
Lisanti, Mariangela
Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth
Safdi, Benjamin
Date Issued
October 2015
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Lee, Samuel K., Mariangela Lisanti, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, and Benjamin R. Safdi. “Modulation Effects in Dark Matter-Electron Scattering Experiments.” Phys. Rev. D 92, no. 8 (October 2015). © 2015 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
One of the next frontiers in dark-matter direct-detection experiments is to explore the MeV to GeV mass regime. Such light dark matter does not carry enough kinetic energy to produce an observable nuclear recoil, but it can scatter off electrons, leading to a measurable signal. We introduce a semianalytic approach to characterize the resulting electron-scattering events in atomic and semiconductor targets, improving on previous analytic proposals that underestimate the signal at high recoil energies. We then use this procedure to study the time-dependent properties of the electron-scattering signal, including the modulation fraction, higher-harmonic modes and modulation phase. The time dependence can be distinct in a nontrivial way from the nuclear scattering case. Additionally, we show that dark-matter interactions inside the Earth can significantly distort the laboratory-frame phase-space distribution of sub-GeV dark matter.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.92.083517
