Migdal-type effect in the dark matter absorption process

Abstract

We propose a new mechanism of absorption of dark matter particles in atoms which resembles the Migdal effect of inelastic dark matter scattering. In this process, atom may be ionized upon absorption of a scalar particle through the scalar-nucleon Yukawa-type interaction. The crucial difference from the inelastic dark matter scattering on atoms is that the total energy of the particle, including its rest mass $m{c}^2$-term, is transferred to the electron. As a result, the emitted electron kinetic energy is about six orders in magnitude bigger than that in the dark matter scattering process. This absorption process allows one to probe dark matter particles with a relatively small mass, in the range from 1 to 100 keV, that cannot be detected in the scattering process. It is also possible to detect hypothetical scalar particles emitted from the Sun. We calculate absorption cross sections of this process in Na, Si, Ar, Ge, I, Xe, and Tl target atoms and extract limits on the scalar-nucleon interaction constant from null results of XENONnT experiment.

7 pages + appendices; journal version

References in corpus (8)

• Searching for dilaton dark matter with atomic clocks
• Bosonic super-WIMPs as keV-scale dark matter
• Search for New Physics in Electronic Recoil Data from XENONnT
• Search for ultralight scalar dark matter with atomic spectroscopy
• Searching for dark matter and variation of fundamental constants with laser and maser interferometry
• The ups and downs of inelastic dark matter: Electron recoils from terrestrial upscattering
• Atomic Ionization by keV-scale Pseudoscalar Dark Matter Particles
• Searching for Scalar Field Dark Matter using Cavity Resonators and Capacitors

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Low-mass constraints on WIMP effective models of inelastic scattering using the Migdal effect
• Limits on scalar dark matter interactions with particles other than the photon via loop corrections to the scalar-photon coupling
• Dark matter pair absorption
• Comparison of the Migdal transition probabilities in electron-atom inelastic cross sections