Speaker
Tongyan Lin
Description
In most direct detection experiments, the free nuclear recoil description of dark matter scattering breaks down for masses ≲ 100 MeV, or when the recoil energy is comparable to a few times the typical phonon energy. For dark matter lighter than 1 MeV, scattering via excitation of a single phonon dominates and has been computed previously, but for the intermediate mass range or higher detector thresholds, multiphonon processes dominate and are challenging to compute. In this talk, I present an analytic description of dark matter scattering that connects the single phonon, multiphonon, and the nuclear recoil regimes. I discuss the theoretical assumptions of the calculation and present results for dark matter in the keV-GeV mass range.
