2021/01/20 by Simon Knapen, Jonathan Kozaczuk, Tongyan Lin · 1 citation
Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Computational physics #Condensed matter physics #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Dielectric #Electron #Electron and X-Ray Spectroscopy Techniques #Electron scattering #Mathematics #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Scattering #Semiconductor #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.104.015031
published as Phys. Rev. D 104, 015031 (2021) · 13 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2021/01/20 · openalex publication_date 2021/07/28 · arxiv updated 2021/08/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
A number of direct detection experiments are searching for electron excitations created by the scattering of sub-GeV dark matter. We present an alternate formulation of dark matter-electron scattering in terms of the dielectric response of a material. For dark matter which couples to electrons, this approach automatically accounts for in-medium screening effects, which were not included in previous rate calculations for semiconductor targets. We show that the screening effects appear for both scalar and vector mediators. The result is a non-negligible reduction of reach for direct detection experiments which use dielectric materials as targets. We also explore different determinations of the dielectric response, including first-principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations and a data-driven analytic approximation using a Mermin oscillator model.