Colloquia

Direct Detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter

by Dr Rouven Essig

Europe/Madrid
C7b/058 - Seminar (IFAE Main Building C7b)

C7b/058 - Seminar

IFAE Main Building C7b

80
Description

Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in our Universe, but we have yet to learn its identity.  A major effort in our quest to identify dark matter are “direct-detection experiments,” which search for dark matter particles in our Milky-Way halo as they traverse Earth and interact in our detectors.  A wide range of materials and ultrasensitive detectors are needed to probe dark matter across a vast range of masses and interactions.  I will focus on dark matter with masses between about 1 keV/c^2 to 1 GeV/c^2 (“sub-GeV dark matter”), and describe how these can be probed by searching for dark matter scattering with electrons in various target materials, such as noble liquids and semiconductors.  I will in particular highlight the experiments SENSEI, DAMIC-M, and Oscura, which use silicon Skipper-CCDs capable of measuring even single-electron events. I will also describe how dark matter that has very strong interactions with ordinary matter can be probed by placing Skipper-CCDs on a satellite, and how such dark matter can be constrained using “dark images” from the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).  Together, we are poised to probe vast new regions of uncharted dark matter territory in the next few years.

 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89787514064?

Organized by

Diego Blas