Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2018
Volume 63, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 14–17, 2018; Columbus, Ohio
Session S09: Sub-GeV Dark Matter |
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Sponsoring Units: DPF Chair: Philip Schuster, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Room: A111 |
Monday, April 16, 2018 1:30PM - 1:54PM |
S09.00001: An Overview of Light Dark Matter Models Asher Berlin In the past several years, null results from direct searches for particle dark matter have cast doubt on the vanilla WIMP paradigm. As a result, there has been resurged interest in models of light dark matter. In this talk, I will give a comprehensive overview of light dark matter models, with a particular focus on various experimental signatures and search strategies. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 16, 2018 1:54PM - 2:06PM |
S09.00002: Sub-GeV Dark Matter: Nuclear Recoil Search Strategies Scott Hertel The direct detection of dark matter in the keV-MeV mass range via nuclear recoils is made difficult by the extremely small recoil energies involved: meV-eV. Such recoils are below the production threshold of standard signal quanta (ionization, scintillation, etc.), and bring us into a necessarily phonon-only detector regime. I will review various strategies and technologies in this nuclear recoil energy window, with some emphasis on superfluid 4He as a target mass. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 16, 2018 2:06PM - 2:18PM |
S09.00003: Future dark matter searches with fixed target proton experiments Robert Cooper, Rex Tayloe Recent theoretical work has highlighted the motivations for sub-GeV dark matter candidates that interact with ordinary matter through new light mediator particles. These scenarios constitute a cosmologically and phenomenologically viable possibility to account for the dark matter of the universe. Such sub-GeV (or light) dark matter particles are difficult to probe using traditional methods of dark matter detection, but can be copiously produced and then detected with proton-beam neutrino experiments at Fermilab, ORNL-SNS, and elsewhere. This is a new experimental approach to the search for dark matter and complements other approaches such as underground direct detection experiments. An overview of the experimental approaches along with specific examples of dark matter sensitivities will be presented. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 16, 2018 2:18PM - 2:30PM |
S09.00004: Beam Dump Experiments with Photon and Electron Beams Elton Smith Programs are underway to search for light dark matter (DM) with masses between 1 and 1000~MeV produced by photon and electron interactions in a beam dump. We summarize various strategies being pursued. Details are given on the Beam-Dump eXperiment (BDX) at Jefferson Lab, which will use a $\sim$1 m$^3$ segmented CsI(Tl) scintillator detector placed downstream of Hall A and accumulate 10$^{22}$ electrons-on-target (EOT) in 285 days. The dark matter signal is an electromagnetic shower of few hundreds of MeV, together with a reduced activity in the surrounding active veto counters. This experiment would be sensitive to elastic DM-electron and to inelastic DM scattering at the level of 10 counts per year, reaching the limit of the neutrino irreducible background.The proposed experiment will be sensitive to large regions of DM parameter space, exceeding the discovery potential of existing and planned experiments in the MeV-GeV DM mass range by up to two orders of magnitude. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 16, 2018 2:30PM - 2:42PM |
S09.00005: SENSEI Javier Tiffenberg, Rouven Essig, Juan Estrada, Tomer Volansky, Tien-Tien Yu We present the status and prospects of the Sub-Electron Noise Skipper Experimental Instrument (SENSEI) that uses a non-destructive readout technique to achieve stable readout for thick fully depleted silicon CCD in the far sub-electron regime (about 0.05 electrons rms/pix). This is the first instrument to achieve discrete sub-electron counting that is stable over millions of pixels on a large-area detector. This low threshold allows for unprecedented sensitivity to the largely unexplored, but theoretically well-motivated, area of sub-GeV dark matter models. We’ll discuss the reach and prospects of the SENSEI experiment currently under construction, which will use 100 grams of Skipper CCDs. We will also present the lessons learned from a small scale prototype currently operating in the MINOS cavern at Fermilab. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 16, 2018 2:42PM - 2:54PM |
S09.00006: Detecting dark matter from Supernovae Gustavo Marques-Tavares, William DeRocco, Peter Graham, Daniel Kasen, Surjeet Rajendran The central region of Supernovae are one of the hottest and densest regions in the Universe. Due to the high temperatures, particles with masses below hundreds of MeV can be copiously produced as long as they have non-negligible couplings to the Standard Model. If dark matter has sub-GeV mass it will be produced in the hot Supernovae core and will have sufficiently large momenta to be detectable in direct detection experiments. In this work we investigate the sensitivity of current and future Xenon based direct detection experiments to a simplified model of dark matter which interacts with the Standard Model via the dark photon portal. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 16, 2018 2:54PM - 3:06PM |
S09.00007: Searching for Dark Matter with Electron Beams using the Missing Momentum and Energy Techniques Jeremiah Mans New experiments at electron accelerators would provide a remarkable opportunity to probe the concept of thermal relic dark matter over most of the viable sub-GeV mass range to a decisive level of sensitivity. This talk will discuss the possibilities of the missing-energy and missing-momentum techniques, with a particular focus on the Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX). LDMX employs the missing-momentum technique, where electrons scattering in a thin target can produce dark matter via “dark bremsstrahlung” giving rise to significant missing momentum and energy in the detector. To identify these rare signal events, LDMX individually tags incoming beam-energy electrons, unambiguously associates them with low energy, moderate transverse-momentum recoils of the incoming electron, and establishes the absence of any additional forward-recoiling charged particles or neutral hadrons. This talk will summarize the small-scale detector concept for LDMX and ongoing performance studies, while also discussing the potential of other proposed experiments based on electron accelerators. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 16, 2018 3:06PM - 3:18PM |
S09.00008: Sub-eV thresholds for dark matter direct detection Yonatan Kahn Probing light dark matter down to the observationally-allowed limit of a few keV requires direct detection experiments with sub-eV thresholds. I will survey two recent proposals for direct detection of keV-MeV dark matter, using superconductors and Dirac semimetals as targets, which hold great promise for significantly increasing experimental sensitivity to dark matter in this mass range which interacts with electrons. Both approaches require single-excitation detection in bulk materials and go hand-in-hand with recent advances in detector technology. [Preview Abstract] |
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