NPA Zoom Seminar, Noah Kurinsky, KICP/Fermilab, "Modeling Interactions of MeV-Scale DM with Crystal Targets: Plasmons, Phonons, and Lattice Defects"
Direct searches for dark matter which targeted SUSY-motivated areas of parameter space employed well-studied nucleon interactions at keV to MeV energy scales to predict typical DM-nucleon interaction distributions. Much lighter DM, probed by a new generation of experiments sensitive to eV-scale energy deposits, however, rely instead on condensed matter effects to extract larger recoil energies from the DM than would be suggested by the simple elastic kinematics of heavier DM.
