2009/07/02 by I. Lazanu, Lazanu, Ionel, S. Lazanu +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #CCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Particle Detector Development and Performance
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0907.0342
openalex publication_date 2009/07/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The nature of dark matter is still an open problem, but there is evidence that a large part of the dark matter in the universe is non-baryonic, non-luminous and non-relativistic and hypothetical Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are candidates that satisfy all of the above criteria. In order to minimize the ambiguities in the identification of WIMPs' interactions in their search, in more experiments, two distinct quantities are simultaneously measured: the ionization and phonon or light from scintillation signals. Silicon and germanium crystals are used in some experiments. In this paper we discuss the production of defects in semiconductors due to WIMP interactions and estimate their contribution in the energy balance. This phenomenon is present at all temperatures, is important in the range of keV energies, but is not taken into consideration in the usual analysis of experimental signals and could introduce errors in identification for WIMPs.