Effect on Dark Matter Exclusion Limits from New Silicon Photoelectric Absorption Measurements

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in cryogenic silicon detector technology allow for the observation of single electron-hole pairs released via particle interactions within the target material. This implies sensitivity to energy depositions as low as the smallest band gap, which is $\sim 1.2$ eV for silicon, and therefore sensitivity to eV/$c^2$-scale bosonic dark matter and to thermal dark matter at masses below 100 MeV/$c^2$. Various interaction channels that can probe the lowest currently accessible masses in direct searches are related to standard photoelectric absorption. In any of these respective dark matter signal models any uncertainty on the photoelectric absorption cross section is propagated into the resulting exclusion limit or into the significance of a potential observation. Using first-time precision measurements of the photoelectric absorption cross section in silicon recently performed at Stanford University, this article examines the importance having accurate knowledge of this parameter at low energies and cryogenic temperatures for these dark matter searches.

arXiv comment9 pages, 8 figures, suppl. material

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• First search for the absorption of fermionic dark matter with the PandaX-4T experiment
• Revisiting the Fermionic Dark Matter Absorption on Electron Target
• Photoelectric absorption cross section of silicon near the band gap from room temperature to sub-Kelvin temperature
• Incoherent Fermionic Dark Matter Absorption with Nucleon Fermi Motion
• Comparison of the Migdal transition probabilities in electron-atom inelastic cross sections