Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 5
Saturday–Tuesday, April 17–20, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session D19: Dark Matter Direct DetectionLive
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Sponsoring Units: DPF Chair: Prisca Cushman, University of Minnesota |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 1:30PM - 1:42PM Live |
D19.00001: Status of LZ Experiment Ibles Olcina, Hugh Lippincott LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a dark matter experiment under construction at the 4850' level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, SD. The experiment utilizes a two-phase time projection chamber (TPC), containing seven active tonnes of liquid xenon, to search for dark matter particles. Auxiliary veto detectors, including a liquid scintillator outer detector, improve rejection of unwanted background events in the central region of the detector. LZ has been designed to improve on current best sensitivities by a factor of 50 or more. The detector is currently being commissioned. This talk will report on the current status of LZ. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 1:42PM - 1:54PM Live |
D19.00002: Anomaly Finding in the LZ Dark Matter Experiment Chami Amarasinghe, Maris Arthurs, Scott Kravitz The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, a 10-ton dual-phase xenon dark matter experiment at the SURF laboratory in South Dakota, is scheduled to start data collection in 2021. For a rare-event detector such as LZ, a general-purpose anomaly finder operating in a high-dimensional feature space can help in identifying and explaining the source of unexpected events stemming from rare backgrounds, rare signals, misclassifications, and abnormalities in detector function. If used with existing data selection algorithms, an anomaly finder can also increase the efficiency of identifying known backgrounds with unusual topologies. In this presentation, we will discuss the utility of anomaly finding and clustering to quickly identify outliers and their origins in simulated data, including those from rare background processes and data processing irregularities. We also discuss how to use these methods on experimental data when LZ comes online, with potential applications to data quality and data selection for specific analyses. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 1:54PM - 2:06PM Live |
D19.00003: LZ Projected Sensitivity to New Physics Via Low-Energy Electron Recoils Winnie Wang LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a new multi-ton liquid xenon time projection chamber for dark matter direct detection.~ The central volume of LZ will be both low background and low-energy threshold, sensitive to electron recoils down to \textasciitilde 1 keV.~ At these energies, electron recoils of pp solar neutrinos will be a significant fraction of the total event rate, and LZ will be sensitive to any low-energy and low-rate Beyond the Standard Model physics. Using simulation data, we present studies of LZ's sensitivity to a BSM neutrino magnetic moments and millicharged neutrinos, as well as other signatures of new physics: axion-like particles, hidden photons, mirror dark matter, and leptophilic dark matter.~ [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 2:06PM - 2:18PM Live |
D19.00004: Interpreting direct detection limits for heavy dark matter Michael Clark Heavy particle dark matter near the Planck mass presents an interesting and relatively unexplored parameter space. Multiply-interacting massive particles (MIMPs) are heavy dark matter particles that interact strongly with regular matter but may have evaded detection due to the low number density required to make up the local dark matter halo. These particles could leave track-like signatures in current experiments, similar to lightly-ionizing particles. Previously calculated limits from the MAJORANA Demonstrator on the flux of lightly-ionizing particles can be used to exclude MIMP dark matter parameter space. In this talk I will present our reinterpretation of the MAJORANA limits, as well as projected sensitivity from the current leading WIMP search XENON1T in this high-mass regime. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 2:18PM - 2:30PM Live |
D19.00005: Status of the DAMIC-M Dark Matter Search Experiment Pitam Mitra The DAMIC (Dark Matter In CCDs) experiment employs charge coupled devices (CCDs) to search for dark matter. The DAMIC Collaboration pioneered the search for nuclear and electronic recoils from low-mass dark matter particles interacting in the bulk silicon of CCDs with a 40g detector operated at the SNOLAB underground laboratory. The DAMIC-M experiment is the successor to DAMIC at SNOLAB and will be installed at the Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane (LSM) in France. The detector will feature the most massive array of CCDs ever built with a significant improvement in the CCD readout stage that allows for the non-destructive, repetitive measurement of the pixel charge to achieve the resolution of single charges. With a significantly larger exposure and lower energy threshold, DAMIC-M will advance by several orders of magnitude the exploration of the dark matter particle hypothesis, in particular of candidates pertaining to the so-called ``hidden sector." In this talk, I will summarize the progress of the DAMIC-M experiment. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 2:30PM - 2:42PM Live |
D19.00006: Background Controls for the DAMIC-M Dark Matter Search Daniel Baxter The DAMIC-M detector will use fully-depleted silicon charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to search for low mass dark matter. The detector will combine the excellent understanding of CCD backgrounds from DAMIC at SNOLAB with ongoing developments in the single-electron resolution of Skipper amplifiers to provide unprecedented sensitivity to light dark matter particles. The DAMIC-M program takes advantage of the unparalleled capability to reject events from radioactivity in the CCDs by exploiting spatial coincidences within a decay chain over timescales as long as months. This, combined with aggressive controls over detector design and material selection, will allow DAMIC-M to probe new models of light dark matter. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 2:42PM - 2:54PM Live |
D19.00007: Search for Beyond Standard Model Rare Events with the Majorana Demonstrator Clint Wiseman, Inwook Kim, José Mariano López-Castaño The \textsc{Majorana Demonstrator} is conducting a search for rare events from beyond-Standard Model physics in its low-energy region of 1--100 keV in parallel with its search for neutrinoless double beta decay. The first result used 1.3 kg-y of commissioning data to search for bosonic dark matter, solar axions, and other rare events. Since that time, up to $\sim$50 kg-y of exposure has been collected and is being analyzed. We have significantly improved the pulse shape analysis, data cleaning, and energy threshold evaluation to achieve an analysis energy threshold of $\sim$1 keV. The resulting energy spectra are used to conduct a search for rare peaks above background in the enriched and natural Ge detectors. In this work, we present our latest results from this updated search for bosonic dark matter and solar axions. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 2:54PM - 3:06PM Live |
D19.00008: Low energy background in a SuperCDMS HVeV detector Runze Ren The SuperCDMS collaboration has been developing low-threshold silicon and germanium detectors optimized for phonon signals from dark matter-nucleus interactions. One series of these devices is called high-voltage eV-resolution (HVeV) detectors. These gram-scale detectors can operate both with no electrical bias in the crystal, measuring only the recoil energy, and under an electric field, which amplifies the signal from electron-hole pairs generated from the recoil events through the Neganov-Trofimov-Luke effect. A recently improved version of the HVeV detector achieved a phonon energy resolution of 2.7 eV. Background exposures on the order of 1 gram-day were acquired with this detector at 0 V and at high voltages in an above-ground laboratory. The 0 V data was used to set a nuclear recoil dark matter limit. The data showed an unexplained excess of events below 200 eV which was further studied by comparing the 0 V data with high voltage data. Several hypotheses are proposed, which will continue to be investigated in future experiments. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 3:06PM - 3:18PM Live |
D19.00009: PICO: Current Status and Future Plans Orin Harris The PICO collaboration uses bubble chambers to search for WIMP dark matter. The bubble chambers are operated at a lower degree of superheat as compared to those of the 1960's, providing much longer live fractions, and excellent rejection of the dominant gamma background. Located at the SNOLAB deep underground laboratory, they are filled with fluorinated target fluids ideally suited for investigating spin-dependent WIMP-proton interactions. Previous bubble chambers, PICO-2L and PICO-60, provide the strongest constraints on spin-dependent WIMP-proton coupling. A new chamber design, PICO-40L, was installed at SNOLAB in 2019, and the ton-scale PICO-500 is currently being designed. This program is projected to improve WIMP-proton scattering sensitivity by an additional two orders of magnitude. I will report on the current status and future plans of these experiments. [Preview Abstract] |
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