Spin-dependent dark matter-electron interactions

Understand

Detectors with low thresholds for electron recoil open a new window to direct searches of sub-GeV dark matter (DM) candidates.

• In the past decade, many strong limits on DM-electron interactions have been set, but most on the one which is spin-independent (SI) of both dark matter and electron spins.
• In this work, we study DM-atom scattering through a spin-dependent (SD) interaction at leading order (LO), using well-benchmarked, state-of-the-art atomic many-body calculations.
• Exclusion limits on the SD DM-electron cross section are derived with data taken from experiments with xenon and germanium detectors at leading sensitivities.