Würzburg 2018 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 52: Suche nach dunkler Materie III

T 52.1: Group Report

Wednesday, March 21, 2018, 16:30–16:50, Philo-HS5

Searching for low-mass dark matter particles with the SuperCDMS experiment — •Belina von Krosigk — University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

A compelling set of diverse astrophysical observations points to the existence of dark matter. The most popular particle dark matter candidates are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). SuperCDMS, the advanced successor of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, is designed to directly observe galactic WIMPs via keV-scale nuclear recoils in semiconductor detectors operated at temperatures around 50 milliKelvin. The nuclear recoils are detected in the form of lattice vibrations (phonons). Additionally, electron-hole pairs produced in the biased crystals drift to the electrodes, creating further phonons. The CDMS low ionization threshold experiment (CDMSlite) modified the operation of existing SuperCDMS detectors to take advantage of this effect. A bias of 70 V applied across these detectors allows very small ionization signals to appear as larger phonon signals, which significantly reduces the energy threshold of the detectors. The most recent results will be presented, which probe a new parameter space for the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section at WIMP masses as low as 1.6 to 4 GeV/c2.