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Medium and High Energy Physics Seminar: Noah Kurinsky (Fermilab) "New Technologies for Sub-GeV Dark Matter Searches at Fermilab"

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Physics
Location
464 Loomis
Date
Sep 30, 2019   1:00 pm  
Speaker
Noah Kurinsky (Fermilab)
Contact
Brandy Shier
E-Mail
bshier@illinois.edu
Views
31

While the case for dark matter continues to strengthen from the astrophysical side, particle dark matter has so far eluded the current generation of experiments, designed to probe the SUSY-motivated mass range of GeV-TeV scale dark matter. Meanwhile, the LHC has ruled out the simpler SUSY models, and the simple picture of a weak-scale, 30 GeV supersymmetric dark matter particle has begun to fade. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in the search for Sub-GeV dark matter down to MeV-scale masses, and the path forward to new technologies capable of probing down to keV-scale mass fermionic dark matter scattering and meV-scale mass bosonic dark matter absorption. These include, but are not limited to, the use of superconductors as well as novel semiconductors as the target medium and readout stages.  The energy resolution required to search for low-mass dark matter makes these technologies interesting as general imaging techniques for infrared and UV astronomy, as well as for coherent neutrino scattering and other low-energy rare event search experiments, and I will briefly touch on applications of these new technologies to those fields. 

The Northwestern EXperiment Underground Site at Fermilab (NEXUS) is a new cryogenic detector testing facility capable of hosting many of these new technologies, and will accelerate and focus dark matter exploration at Fermilab in an unprecedented manner. This ‘User Facility’ for dark matter will help incubate new technologies, test their limits in a low background environment, and be a springboard for these technologies as they are adopted by other fields of physics. The NEXUS collaboration is currently instrumenting the facility to run its first battery of dark matter searches in 2020-2021, and looks to open a new decade with a new window into light dark matter. I will end my talk with a brief teaser for the current and future capabilities at NEXUS, and encourage discussion during the visit of ways to best utilize this unique facility.

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