Extending the leading direct dark matter searches to lighter particles

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• Prof Henrique Araujo (Imperial)
• Tuesday 07 February 2023, 11:00-12:00
• Ryle Seminar Room.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact William Fawcett.

The landscape of particle dark matter remains wide open, and the direct detection of galactic particles via scattering with ordinary matter is regarded as one of the main avenues to address this mystery. Different experimental techniques each cover limited parts of this parameter space, with the electroweak scale from GeV to TeV masses – the traditional space for thermally-produced WIM Ps motivated by supersymmetry and other models – still attracting most experimental effort. Here there is a route to address fully the available parameter space above irreducible neutrino backgrounds, and I will report on the status of the leading search – LUX -ZEPLIN (LZ) – and of a future (and maybe definitive) experiment in this space. Just below these masses there are other well-motivated models where dark matter is produced non-thermally, along with other interesting rare-event physics. These lighter candidates require lighter target materials to yield observable nuclear recoils, but the largest and most sensitive detectors are often made from heavier elements – notably xenon. So how can we extend the reach of these experiments to lower masses? I will describe the various experimental techniques being used now or being developed, and our own efforts to enable these searches via the so-called Migdal effect – which we are aiming to confirm experimentally with the MIGDAL experiment.

This talk is part of the Cavendish HEP Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Cavendish Laboratory Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cavendish HEP Seminars
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Featured lists
• ME Seminar
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• Ryle Seminar Room
• School of Physical Sciences
• Thin Film Magnetic Talks
• few29

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