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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 21: Astrophysics and Ions

MO 21.4: Vortrag

Freitag, 13. März 2020, 15:00–15:15, f142

Direct detection of nuclear scattering of sub-Gev dark matter using molecular excitations — •Jesús Pérez-Ríos¹, Harikrishnan Ramani², Oren Slone³, and Rouven Essig⁴ — ¹Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Faradayweg 4-6, D-14195 Berlin, Germany — ²Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA — ³Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA — ⁴C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stony Brook University, New York 11794-384, USA

The evidence for the existence of dark matter, which makes up about 85% of the matter density in the Universe, is overwhelming. Efforts to detect galactic dark matter particles in the laboratory are crucial for developing a detailed understanding of the particle nature of dark matter. The past decades have seen tremendous progress in direct-detection searches for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which have masses above the proton. However, dark matter with masses below the proton is woefully underexplored, despite being theoretically well-motivated. We propose a novel direct detection concept to search for dark matter with masses in the 100 keV to 100 MeV range. Here, dark matter particles scatter off molecules in a gas and exciting a vibrational and rotational state of the molecule. The excited rovibrational mode relaxes rapidly and produces a spectacular signal consisting of multiple infrared photons, which can be observed with ultrasensitive photodetectors