Silicon carbide detectors for sub-GeV dark matter

Sinéad M Griffin,To Chin Yu,Yonit Hochberg,Noah Kurinsky,Tongyan Lin,Katherine Inzani

doi:10.1103/physrevd.103.075002

Abstract

We propose the use of silicon carbide (SiC) for direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter. SiC has properties similar to both silicon and diamond, but has two key advantages: (i) it is a polar semiconductor which allows sensitivity to a broader range of dark matter candidates; and (ii) it exists in many stable polymorphs with varying physical properties, and hence has tunable sensitivity to various dark matter models. We show that SiC is an excellent target to search for electron, nuclear and phonon excitations from scattering of dark matter down to 10 keV in mass, as well as for absorption processes of dark matter down to 10 meV in mass. Combined with its widespread use as an alternative to silicon in other detector technologies and its availability compared to diamond, our results demonstrate that SiC holds much promise as a novel dark matter detector.

Highlights

The identification of the particle nature of dark matter (DM) is one of the most pressing problems facing modern physics and will be a key focus for high-energy physics and cosmology in the coming decade [1,2]
For DM which interacts with the crystal via phonon production, the thresholds loosely follow the sensor design road map outlined in Table III, though the thresholds have been modified to highlight critical values
In this paper we proposed the use of silicon carbide (SiC) for direct detection of light DM

Summary

Introduction

The identification of the particle nature of dark matter (DM) is one of the most pressing problems facing modern physics and will be a key focus for high-energy physics and cosmology in the coming decade [1,2]. In the absence of evidence for dark matter at the weak scale, interest has grown in direct searches for DM with sub-GeV mass [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. The technical challenge inherent in searching for nonrelativistic, sub-GeV, weakly interacting particles can be seen by considering the case of a classical nuclear recoil. For DM with a mass mχ much smaller than the target nucleus, moving at the escape velocity of the galaxy, the maximum energy transfer for a classical elastic scattering nuclear-recoil event is ΔE ≈ meV AT 1 mχ.

Methods

Results

Conclusion