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Dark matter-electron scattering in dielectrics

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arxiv 2101.08275 v1 pith:UTSE5F4F submitted 2021-01-20 hep-ph

Dark matter-electron scattering in dielectrics

classification hep-ph
keywords darkdielectricscatteringcalculationsdetectiondirecteffectsexperiments
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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A number of direct detection experiments are searching for electron excitations created by scattering of sub-GeV dark matter. We present an alternate formulation of dark matter-electron scattering in terms of the dielectric response of a material. For dark matter which couples to electrons, this approach automatically accounts for in-medium screening effects, which were not included in previous rate calculations for semiconductor targets. We show that the screening effects appear for both scalar and vector mediators. The result is a non-negligible reduction of reach for direct detection experiments which use dielectric materials as targets. We also explore different determinations of the dielectric response, including first-principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations and a data-driven analytic approximation using a Mermin oscillator model.

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