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Nov. 24, 2022

Solid State Detectors for Low-Mass Dark Matter Searches

Dark matter searches over the past few decades have been largely focused on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles in the ~10 GeV - 1 TeV mass range. The absence of any conclusive discovery, along with various theoretical developments and certain astrophysical observations, has recently motivated the direct detection community to broaden our experimental program to search for dark matter candidates in the <10 GeV mass range. Solid-state detectors provide many advantages for such searches. This talk will summarize recent advances in phonon- and ionization-based semiconductor crystal experiments such as SuperCDMS and EDELWEISS, cryogenic scintillating calorimeter experiments such as CRESST, and Charge-Coupled Device experiments such as DAMIC and SENSEI. It will also discuss future prospects and discovery potential for solid-state detectors with respect to various low-mass dark matter candidates, including dark photons, axion-like particles, and lightly-ionizing particles.

Solid State Detectors for Low-Mass Dark Matter Searches
Host: Paul Kushner
Event series  Physics Colloquium