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  • Open Access

First High-Throughput Evaluation of Dark Matter Detector Materials

Sinéad M. Griffin1,2, Yonit Hochberg3,4, Benjamin V. Lehmann5, Rotem Ovadia3,4, Kristin A. Persson1,6, Bethany A. Suter7, Ruo Xi Yang1,2, and Wayne Zhao1,6,8

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 191801 – Published 11 May, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bb4g-7939

Abstract

We perform the first high-throughput search and evaluation of materials that can serve as excellent low-mass dark matter detectors. Using properties of close to 1000 materials from the Materials Project database, we project the sensitivity in dark matter parameter space for experiments constructed from each material, including both absorption and scattering processes between dark matter and electrons. Using the anisotropic materials in the dataset, we further compute the level of daily modulation in interaction rates and the resulting directional sensitivities, highlighting materials with prospects to detect the dark matter wind. Our methods provide the basic tools for the data-driven design of dark matter detectors, and our findings lay the groundwork for the next generation of highly optimized direct searches for dark matter as light as the keV scale. This represents a major step in the application of results from condensed matter physics to dark matter search design.

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 191801– Published 11 May, 2026
  • Received 16 July 2025
  • Accepted 18 March 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the 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.

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