Session D02: New Approaches to Direct Dark Matter Searches

New Accelerator Searches for Light Dark Matter

In this talk I will give an overview of recent progress in understanding light ( [Preview Abstract]

Exploring dark sectors at FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC

New physics has traditionally been expected in the high-$p_T$ region at high-energy collider experiments. If new particles are light and weakly-coupled, however, this focus may be completely misguided: light particles are typically highly concentrated within a few mrad of the beam line, allowing sensitive searches with small detectors, and even extremely weakly-coupled particles may be produced in large numbers there. In this talk I will discuss the recent proposal of FASER, ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC: a detector placed $400~\rm{m}$ downstream of the ATLAS or CMS interaction point (IP) in the very forward region and operated concurrently there. Even with a small and inexpensive cylindrical detector, of volume $\sim 1~\rm{m}^3$, FASER would have a new physics discovery potential in a swath of currently unconstrained parameter-space which is comparable to, and complementary to, much larger proposed experiments. I explore this in the talk for models such as dark photons, dark higgses, axion-like particles, and heavy neutral leptons, and discuss some of the future experimental challenges involved.   

Demonstration of Single Ionization Sensitive Cryogenic Calorimeters and Their Potential In Electron Recoil Dark Matter Searches

Substantial astronomical observations have established that approximately 25\% of the energy density of the Universe is composed of cold non-baryonic dark matter, whose detection and characterization could be key to improving our understanding of the laws of physics. Over the past three decades, physicists have largely focused on searching for dark matter within the 10 GeV-1 TeV range (WIMPs), with ever more sensitive limits. The absence of a discovery has motivated us to broaden our experimental search program to look for dark matter throughout the mass range from 10$^{-22}$eV to 10$^{19}$GeV.\\ \\ In this talk, we present results from the first search of the SuperCDMS collaboration for inelastic electronic recoils with low mass (500keV - 100MeV) dark matter and for eV scale bosonic dark matter using our new single ionization sensitive cryogenic calorimeters. Since the search was performed at the surface with minimal overburden, this search has implications for strongly-interacting dark matter particle models like those proposed to explain the anomalously large 21~cm signal observed by the EDGES collaboration.