TY - JOUR
T1 - Precise predictions and new insights for atomic ionization from the Migdal effect
AU - McCabe, Christopher
AU - Dolan, Matthew J
AU - Cox, Peter
AU - Quiney, Harry
N1 - Funding Information:
P. C. is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award No. DE210100446. M. J. D. is supported by the Australian Research Council. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council through the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, CE200100008. C. M. is supported by the UKRI’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (Awards No. ST/N004663/1, No. ST/V001876/1, and No. ST/T000759/1). We are grateful to members of the MIGDAL Collaboration for discussions and particularly thank T. Marley (Imperial) for generating the neutron scattering cross sections used in this work. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
PY - 2023/2/27
Y1 - 2023/2/27
N2 - The scattering of neutral particles by an atomic nucleus can lead to electronic ionization and excitation through a process known as the Migdal effect. We revisit and improve upon previous calculations of the Migdal effect, using the Dirac-Hartree-Fock method to calculate the atomic wave functions. Our methods do not rely on the use of the dipole approximation, allowing us to present robust results for higher nuclear recoil velocities than was previously possible. Our calculations provide the theoretical foundations for future measurements of the Migdal effect using neutron sources, and searches for dark matter in direct detection experiments. We show that multiple ionization must be taken into account in experiments with fast neutrons, and derive the semi-inclusive probability for processes that yield a hard electron above a defined energy threshold. We present results for the noble elements up to and including xenon, as well as carbon, fluorine, silicon and germanium. The transition probabilities from our calculations are publicly available.
AB - The scattering of neutral particles by an atomic nucleus can lead to electronic ionization and excitation through a process known as the Migdal effect. We revisit and improve upon previous calculations of the Migdal effect, using the Dirac-Hartree-Fock method to calculate the atomic wave functions. Our methods do not rely on the use of the dipole approximation, allowing us to present robust results for higher nuclear recoil velocities than was previously possible. Our calculations provide the theoretical foundations for future measurements of the Migdal effect using neutron sources, and searches for dark matter in direct detection experiments. We show that multiple ionization must be taken into account in experiments with fast neutrons, and derive the semi-inclusive probability for processes that yield a hard electron above a defined energy threshold. We present results for the noble elements up to and including xenon, as well as carbon, fluorine, silicon and germanium. The transition probabilities from our calculations are publicly available.
UR - https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.107.035032
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85149497512&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.035032
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.035032
M3 - Article
VL - 107
JO - Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
JF - Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
IS - 3
M1 - 035032
ER -