Tongyan Lin (UCSD)

11am Wednesday March 3, 2021
Webinar

Dark matter scattering in dielectrics

Direct detection experiments are rapidly advancing in the search for sub-GeV dark matter. As energy thresholds become lower, the many-body physics of a target material becomes increasingly important to understand in determining the dark matter signal. In this talk, I will show how dark matter scattering in dielectric materials can be understood in terms of the dielectric response. This provides both a useful conceptual framing, and also allows us to calculate several new effects. I will discuss two applications: screening effects for dark matter electron scattering, and the Migdal effect in semiconductors.