Short remarks on possible production of defects in low temperature semiconductor detectors for dark matter physics experiments

TL;DR

This paper discusses how defect production in low-temperature semiconductor detectors, used in dark matter experiments, can affect energy measurements and potentially lead to errors in identifying WIMP interactions.

Contribution

It highlights the significance of defect formation in semiconductors during WIMP interactions and estimates its impact on energy balance, an aspect often overlooked in current analyses.

Findings

Defects are produced at all temperatures during WIMP interactions.

Defect formation impacts energy measurements in the keV range.

Ignoring defects could lead to errors in dark matter detection.

Abstract

The nature of dark matter is still an open problem, but there is evidence that a large part of the dark matter in the universe is non-baryonic, non-luminous and non-relativistic and hypothetical Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are candidates that satisfy all of the above criteria. In order to minimize the ambiguities in the identification of WIMPs' interactions in their search, in more experiments, two distinct quantities are simultaneously measured: the ionization and phonon or light from scintillation signals. Silicon and germanium crystals are used in some experiments. In this paper we discuss the production of defects in semiconductors due to WIMP interactions and estimate their contribution in the energy balance. This phenomenon is present at all temperatures, is important in the range of keV energies, but is not taken into consideration in the usual analysis of experimental signals and could introduce errors in identification for WIMPs.