Phonon-mediated Migdal effect in semiconductor detectors

Abstract

The Migdal effect inside detectors provides a new possibility of probing the sub-GeV dark matter (DM) particles. While there has been well-established methods treating the Migdal effect in isolated atoms, a coherent and complete description of the valence electrons in semiconductor is still absent. The bremstrahlung-like approach is a promising attempt, but it turns invalid for DM masses below a few tens of MeV. In this paper, we lay out a framework where phonon is chosen as an effective degree of freedom to describe the Migdal effect in semiconductors. In this picture, a valence electron is excited to the conduction state via exchange of a virtual phonon, accompanied by a multi-phonon process triggered by an incident DM particle. Under the incoherent approximation, it turns out that this approach can effectively push the sensitivities of the semiconductor targets further down to the MeV DM mass region.

In the previous version, the $T_0$ term is omitted in the numerical implementation of Eq.(3.4). In this version, the $T_0$ term is included, and it is found that the Migdal event rates calculated from the phonon-mediated approach and the impulse approximation coincide quite well even in the low DM mass range

References in corpus (11)

• Detection of sub-MeV Dark Matter with Three-Dimensional Dirac Materials
• Semiconductor Probes of Light Dark Matter
• Probing sub-GeV Dark Matter with conventional detectors
• Light Dark Matter in Superfluid Helium: Detection with Multi-excitation Production
• Sub-GeV Dark Matter Detection with Electron Recoils in Carbon Nanotubes
• Detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter and Solar Neutrinos via Chemical-Bond Breaking
• Direct Detection of Spin-Dependent Sub-GeV Dark Matter via Migdal Effect
• Dark Matter, Dark Photon and Superfluid He-4 from Effective Field Theory
• Dark Matter Direct Detection in Materials with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Velocity Dependent Dark Matter Interactions in Single-Electron Resolution Semiconductor Detectors with Directional Sensitivity
• Direct detection of Sub-GeV Dark Matter via 3-body Inelastic Scattering Process

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Precise predictions and new insights for atomic ionisation from the Migdal effect
• Dark matter direct detection from the single phonon to the nuclear recoil regime
• The Migdal Effect in Semiconductors for Dark Matter with Masses below $\sim$100 MeV
• The Molecular Migdal Effect
• Measuring the Migdal effect in semiconductors for dark matter detection
• Optimal anti-ferromagnets for light dark matter detection
• On the impact of the Migdal effect in reactor CE$\nu$NS experiments
• Probing Dark Matter Electromagnetic Properties in Direct Detection Experiments
• Measuring the molecular Migdal effect with neutron scattering on diatomic gases
• Charge transport in chiral solids as a possible tool in search of dark matter signals
• The Migdal effect in solid crystals and the role of non-adiabaticity
• Comparison of the Migdal transition probabilities in electron-atom inelastic cross sections