Abstract
Dark matter detectors with directional sensitivity have the capability to distinguish dark matter induced nuclear recoils from isotropic backgrounds, thus providing a smoking gun signature for dark matter in the Galactic halo. Motivated by recent progress in graphene and two-dimensional materials research, we propose a novel class of directional dark matter detectors utilizing graphene-based van der Waals heterostructures. A conceptual design of the detector based on graphene/hexagonal boron nitride and graphene/molybdenum disulfide heterostructures is developed and analyzed. The proposed detector has modular scalability, keV-scale detection threshold, nanometer position resolution, sensitivity down to 10 mathrm {GeV}/c^2 dark matter mass, and intrinsic head-tail discrimination and background rejection capabilities.
Highlights
A wide range of independent astrophysical observations on galactic and cosmological scales strongly indicate that more than 80% of the matter in our Universe is in a form of nonluminous, nonbaryonic dark matter (DM) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
We note that UV and X-ray bremsstrahlung photons from nuclear recoils in conventional liquid xenon detectors have recently been suggested as possible signatures for sub-GeV/c2 weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) direct detection [95]
For a 10 GeV/c2 WIMP and a 5-nm-thick beryllium film, SRIM simulations shows that the energy of a typical recoiling Be nucleus after escaping from the film is about 1.34 keV, and on average there are about 13 vacancies created in the graphene/h-BN heterostructure
Summary
A wide range of independent astrophysical observations on galactic and cosmological scales strongly indicate that more than 80% of the matter in our Universe is in a form of nonluminous, nonbaryonic dark matter (DM) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. In light of the direct information encoding and delayed information decoding, nuclear recoil tracks can be measured with nanometer precision by a suitable combination of detection materials with an intrinsic nanometer structure and readout devices with a commensurate spatial resolution. With these merits in mind, we argue that graphenebased heterostructures are ideally suited as the detection material of a new class of directional detectors with nanometer precision. Graphene layers and carbon nanotubes have been suggested as targets for directional detection of DM [47,48,49,50,51] and direct detection of cosmic neutrino background [51,52]
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