Publications (22)
Earth-Scattering Induced Modulation in Low-Threshold Dark Matter Experiments
Xavier Bertou, Ansh Desai, Timon Emken +3
Dark matter particles with sufficiently large interactions with ordinary matter can scatter in the Earth before reaching and scattering in a detector. This induces a modulation in…
Solar reflection of dark matter with dark-photon mediators
Timon Emken, Rouven Essig, Hailin Xu
We consider the scattering of low-mass halo dark-matter particles in the hot plasma of the Sun, focusing on dark matter that interact with ordinary matter through a dark-photon med…
Solar reflection of light dark matter with heavy mediators
Timon Emken
The direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter particles is hampered by their low energy deposits. If the maximum deposit allowed by kinematics falls below the energy threshold of a d…
Model independent limits on an ultra-light gravitino from Supernovae
Riccardo Catena, Laura Covi, Timon Emken
We revisit astrophysical constraints on models with an ultra-light gravitino, in particular extending the analysis to more general models and the case of R-parity breaking. These c…
Dark Matter in the Earth and the Sun -- Simulating Underground Scatterings for the Direct Detection of Low-Mass Dark Matter
Timon Emken
If DM-matter scatterings are assumed to occur in a detector's target material, collisions will naturally take place inside the bulk of planets and stars as well. For large cross se…
Atomic responses to general dark matter-electron interactions
Riccardo Catena, Timon Emken, Nicola A. Spaldin +1
In the leading paradigm of modern cosmology, about 80% of our Universe's matter content is in the form of hypothetical, as yet undetected particles. These do not emit or absorb rad…
obscura: A modular C++ tool and library for the direct detection of (sub-GeV) dark matter via nuclear and electron recoils
Timon Emken
For the interpretation of past and future direct searches for dark matter (DM) particles, it is important to be able to provide accurate predictions for event rates and spectra und…
Dark matter - electron interactions in materials beyond the dark photon model
Riccardo Catena, Daniel Cole, Timon Emken +4
The search for sub-GeV dark matter (DM) particles via electronic transitions in underground detectors attracted much theoretical and experimental interest in the past few years. A…
Direct searches for general dark matter-electron interactions with graphene detectors: Part II. Sensitivity studies
Riccardo Catena, Timon Emken, Marek Matas +2
We use a formalism that describes electron ejections from graphene-like targets by dark matter (DM) scattering for general forms of scalar and spin 1/2 DM-electron interactions in…
The Sun as a sub-GeV Dark Matter Accelerator
Timon Emken, Chris Kouvaris, Niklas Grønlund Nielsen
Sub-GeV halo dark matter that enters the Sun can potentially scatter off hot solar nuclei and be ejected much faster than its incoming velocity. We derive an expression for the rat…
Resonant or asymmetric: The status of sub-GeV dark matter
Sowmiya Balan, Csaba Balázs, Torsten Bringmann +9
Sub-GeV dark matter (DM) particles produced via thermal freeze-out evade many of the strong constraints on heavier DM candidates but at the same time face a multitude of new constr…
Direct Detection of Strongly Interacting Sub-GeV Dark Matter via Electron Recoils
Timon Emken, Rouven Essig, Chris Kouvaris +1
We consider direct-detection searches for sub-GeV dark matter via electron scatterings in the presence of large interactions between dark and ordinary matter. Scatterings both on e…
SENSEI: First Direct-Detection Results on sub-GeV Dark Matter from SENSEI at SNOLAB
SENSEI Collaboration, Prakruth Adari, Itay M. Bloch +34
We present the first results from a dark matter search using six Skipper-CCDs in the SENSEI detector operating at SNOLAB. We employ a bias-mitigation technique of hiding approximat…
Terrestrial Effects on Dark Matter-Electron Scattering Experiments
Timon Emken, Chris Kouvaris, Ian M. Shoemaker
A well-studied possibility is that dark matter may reside in a sector secluded from the Standard Model, except for the so-called photon portal: kinetic mixing between the ordinary…
Projected sensitivity to sub-GeV dark matter of next-generation semiconductor detectors
Erik Andersson, Alex Bökmark, Riccardo Catena +3
We compute the projected sensitivity to dark matter (DM) particles in the sub-GeV mass range of future direct detection experiments using germanium and silicon semiconductor target…
Direct searches for general dark matter-electron interactions with graphene detectors: Part I. Electronic structure calculations
Riccardo Catena, Timon Emken, Marek Matas +2
We develop a formalism to describe electron ejections from graphene-like targets by dark matter (DM) scattering for general forms of scalar and spin 1/2 DM-electron interactions an…
Crystal responses to general dark matter-electron interactions
Riccardo Catena, Timon Emken, Marek Matas +2
We develop a formalism to describe the scattering of dark matter (DM) particles by electrons bound in crystals for a general form of the underlying DM-electron interaction. Such a…
Rejecting the Majorana nature of dark matter with electron scattering experiments
Riccardo Catena, Timon Emken, Julia Ravanis
Assuming that Dark Matter (DM) is made of fermions in the sub-GeV mass range with interactions dominated by electromagnetic moments of higher order, such as the electric and magnet…
DaMaSCUS: The Impact of Underground Scatterings on Direct Detection of Light Dark Matter
Timon Emken, Chris Kouvaris
Conventional dark matter direct detection experiments set stringent constraints on dark matter by looking for elastic scattering events between dark matter particles and nuclei in…
Measuring the local Dark Matter density in the laboratory
Bradley J. Kavanagh, Timon Emken, Riccardo Catena
Despite strong evidence for the existence of large amounts of dark matter (DM) in our Universe, there is no direct indication of its presence in our own solar system. All estimates…
The ups and downs of inelastic dark matter: Electron recoils from terrestrial upscattering
Timon Emken, Jonas Frerick, Saniya Heeba +1
The growing interest in the interactions between dark matter particles and electrons has received a further boost by the observation of an excess in electron recoil events in the X…
How blind are underground and surface detectors to strongly interacting Dark Matter?
Timon Emken, Chris Kouvaris
Above a critical dark matter-nucleus scattering cross section any terrestrial direct detection experiment loses sensitivity to dark matter, since the Earth crust, atmosphere, and p…