TY - JOUR
T1 - Dark matter direct detection with quantum dots
AU - Blanco, Carlos
AU - Essig, Rouven
AU - Fernandez-Serra, Marivi
AU - Ramani, Harikrishnan
AU - Slone, Oren
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
PY - 2023/5/1
Y1 - 2023/5/1
N2 - We propose using quantum dots as novel targets to probe sub-GeV dark matter-electron interactions. Quantum dots are nanocrystals of semiconducting material, which are commercially available, with gram-scale quantities suspended in liter-scale volumes of solvent. Quantum dots can be efficient scintillators, with near unity single-photon quantum yields, and their band-edge electronic properties are determined by their characteristic size, which can be precisely tuned. Examples include lead sulfide and lead selenide quantum dots, which can be tuned to have sub-eV optical gaps. A dark-matter interaction can generate one or more electron-hole pairs (excitons), with the multiexciton state decaying via the emission of two photons with an efficiency of about 10% of the single-photon quantum yield. An experimental setup using commercially available quantum dots and two photomultiplier-tubes for detecting the coincident two-photon signal can already improve on existing dark-matter bounds, while using photodetectors with lower dark-count rates can improve on current constraints by orders of magnitude.
AB - We propose using quantum dots as novel targets to probe sub-GeV dark matter-electron interactions. Quantum dots are nanocrystals of semiconducting material, which are commercially available, with gram-scale quantities suspended in liter-scale volumes of solvent. Quantum dots can be efficient scintillators, with near unity single-photon quantum yields, and their band-edge electronic properties are determined by their characteristic size, which can be precisely tuned. Examples include lead sulfide and lead selenide quantum dots, which can be tuned to have sub-eV optical gaps. A dark-matter interaction can generate one or more electron-hole pairs (excitons), with the multiexciton state decaying via the emission of two photons with an efficiency of about 10% of the single-photon quantum yield. An experimental setup using commercially available quantum dots and two photomultiplier-tubes for detecting the coincident two-photon signal can already improve on existing dark-matter bounds, while using photodetectors with lower dark-count rates can improve on current constraints by orders of magnitude.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85161143286
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.095035
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.095035
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AN - SCOPUS:85161143286
SN - 2470-0010
VL - 107
JO - Physical Review D
JF - Physical Review D
IS - 9
M1 - 095035
ER -