Direct searches for general dark matter-electron interactions with graphene detectors: Part II. Sensitivity studies

Understand

We use a formalism that describes electron ejections from graphene-like targets by dark matter (DM) scattering for general forms of scalar and spin 1/2 DM-electron interactions in combination with state-of-the-art density functional calculations to produce predictions and reach estimates for various possible carbon-based detector designs.

• Our results indicate the importance of a proper description of the target electronic structure.
• In addition, we find a strong dependence of the predicted observed signal for different DM candidate masses and interaction types on the detailed geometry and design of the detector.
• Combined with directional background vetoing, these dependencies will enable the identification of DM particle properties once a signal has been established.