Energy loss in low energy nuclear recoils in dark matter detector materials

Abstract

Recent progress in phonon-mediated detectors with eV-scale nuclear recoil energy sensitivity requires an understanding of the effect of the crystalline defects on the energy spectrum expected from dark matter or neutrino coherent scattering. We have performed molecular dynamics simulations to determine the amount of energy stored in the lattice defects as a function of the recoil direction and energy. This energy can not be observed in the phonon measurement, thus affecting the observed energy spectrum compared to the underlying true recoil energy spectrum. We describe this effect for multiple commonly used detector materials and demonstrate how the predicted energy spectrum from dark matter scattering is modified.

arXiv comment10 pages, 5 figures, one table. The MD simulation data can be obtained from https://github.com/sebsassi/elosssim ; v2 matches the published version

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• Spontaneous damage annealing reactions as a possible source of low energy excess in semiconductor detectors
• Nuclear Recoil Identification in a Scientific Charge-Coupled Device
• Defect Formation in NaI Crystals: A Novel Pathway to Dark Matter Detection
• Hermitian formulation for mass dimension one fermions: Flat and curved space-times
• Novel coincidence detection technique for precision measurement of neutron-capture-induced nuclear recoils