Astroparticle physics has grown from a niche area to a worldwide research enterprise, with two priority topics,
among others, both introduced almost 100 years ago and remaining still a challenge today: First, the nature of
Dark Matter (DM), which makes up more than 80 % of the matter in our universe, is still a mystery today. While
the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) successfully explains the visible universe, it has no explanation
for DM, and direct DM searches are a crucial avenue to unravel the nature of DM.
Second, the extensively studied neutrinos, due to their mass and mixing properties, also provide a window to
physics beyond the Standard Model and, once more, underline our present incomplete understanding of the
major building blocks of nature.
This workshop aims to explore both the similarities and complementarities between dark matter and the
neutrino sector in the context of direct detection experiments with a particular focus on electronic excitations.
In the past decades, the dark matter community has been concentrating to a fair degree on DM nuclear
interactions, with the standard approach of measuring the nuclear recoil energy induced by DM particles
scattering elastically off the detector target’s nuclei.
The observation that neutrino fluxes with MeV energies from the sun and supernovae induce detectable signals
in direct detection experiments has driven the detection of CEvNS.
In this program, we wish to clarify the role of electronic excitations in different systems induced by primary
nuclear and electron interactions, treated from theoretical and experimental points of view, both for dark matter
and neutrino sectors. These aspects are interconnected, and advancing the field requires a collective effort
from particle, atomic, and condensed matter theoretical and experimental physics.