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arXiv · 2507.14345

Excitonic contributions to dark matter-electron scattering

Nora Taufertshöfer·Vanessa Zema·Riccardo Catena·Valerio Olevano·Nicola A. Spaldin
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Abstract

We determine whether excitonic effects affect predictions of dark matter (DM)-electron scattering rates by calculating the energy- and momentum-dependent energy-loss function, including electron-hole interaction excitonic effects, for the dark-matter scintillating detector materials GaAs and NaI. By comparing our results using the Bethe-Salpeter equation in the framework of many-body perturbation theory, which explicitly includes excitonic effects, with those using the quasiparticle random-phase approximation, which includes only electron-electron interaction and crystal local-field effects, we find that excitonic effects in NaI significantly increase the predicted scattering rate at low energy and as a result improve the cross-section sensitivity considering a realistic background. In contrast, the predicted scattering rate and the DM-electron scattering cross-section for GaAs are minimally affected by excitonic effects.

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Nora Taufertshöfer, Vanessa Zema, Riccardo Catena, Valerio Olevano, Nicola A. Spaldin. 2025-07-18. Excitonic contributions to dark matter-electron scattering. https://doi.org/10.1103/9b1j-fcvw

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