Journal article
Precise predictions and new insights for atomic ionization from the Migdal effect
P Cox, MJ Dolan, C McCabe, HM Quiney
Physical Review D | AMER PHYSICAL SOC | Published : 2023
Open access
Abstract
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 i..
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Awarded by UK Research and Innovation
Funding Acknowledgements
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.