Time: 2pm
Location: A8 (New location)
Title: Direct Detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter: A New Frontier
Abstract:
Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in our Universe, but we have yet to learn its identity. While most experimental searches focus on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with masses above the proton (about 1 GeV/c^2), it is important to also consider other motivated dark-matter candidates. Indeed, over the last decade, the theoretical landscape of possible dark-matter candidates has expanded significantly to consider masses from 10^-22 eV/c^2 up to the Planck mass, and even higher in the case of composite dark matter. At the same time, many novel dark-matter detection concepts have been put forward.
In this talk, I will discuss the search for dark matter with masses between about 500 keV/c^2 and 1 GeV/c^2. This range of masses is theoretically well-motivated and presents a new frontier in the search for dark matter that has seen tremendous progress in the last few years. I will describe a few direct-detection strategies that can probe this under-explored mass range. In particular, I will highlight SENSEI, a funded experiment that will use new ultra-low-threshold silicon CCD detectors (“Skipper CCDs”). I will describe the first results from SENSEI and show how this experiment will probe vast new regions of parameter space in the next few years.
