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High-accuracy measurement of Compton scattering in germanium for dark matter searches

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Abstract

Compton scattering with bound electrons contributes to a significant atomic effect in low-momentum transfer, yielding background structures in direct light dark matter searches as well as low-energy rare event experiments. We report the measurement of Compton scattering in low-momentum transfer by implementing a 10-g germanium detector bombarded by a \(^{137}\text{Cs}\) source with a radioactivity of 8.7 mCi and a scatter photon captured by a cylindrical NaI(Tl) detector. A fully relativistic impulse approximation combined with multi-configuration Dirac–Fock wavefunctions was evaluated, and the scattering function of Geant4 software was replaced by our calculation results. Our measurements show that the Livermore model with the modified scattering function in Geant4 is in good agreement with the experimental data. It is also revealed that atomic many-body effects significantly influence Compton scattering for low-momentum transfer (sub-keV energy transfer).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Physics, Sichuan University, 610065, Chengdu, China

    Hai-Tao Jia, Shin-Ted Lin, Shu-Kui Liu, Chang-Hao Fang, Peng Gu, Xi Jiang, Yi-Ke Shu, Qian-Yun Li, Yu Liu, Ren-Ming-Jie Li, Chen-Kai Qiao, Chang-Jian Tang, Hao-Yang Xing, Yu-Lu Yan & Kang-Kang Zhao

  2. Department of Physics, National Dong Hwa University, 97401, Shoufeng, Hualien, China

    Hsin-Chang Chi

  3. Department of Physics, Dokuz Eylül University, 35160, Buca, İzmir, Turkey

    Muhammed Deniz

  4. Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, 11529, Taipei, China

    Henry Tsz-King Wong

  5. Key Laboratory of Particle and Radiation Imaging (Ministry of Education) and Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, China

    Li-Tao Yang & Qian Yue

  6. Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology, Sichuan University, 610065, Chengdu, China

    Jing-Jun Zhu

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  1. Hai-Tao Jia
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Hai-Tao Jia, Shin-Ted Lin, Shu-Kui Liu, Peng Gu and Chang-Jian Tang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Hai-Tao Jia and Chen-Kai Qiao, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Shin-Ted Lin or Shu-Kui Liu.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFA0402203), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11975159 and 11975162).

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Jia, HT., Lin, ST., Liu, SK. et al. High-accuracy measurement of Compton scattering in germanium for dark matter searches. NUCL SCI TECH 33, 157 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41365-022-01148-1

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