Speaker
Description
As part of the SuperCDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) experiment, small instruments dubbed HVeV (high-voltage, electronvolt-scale resolution) detectors have been under continuous development to aid in the search for dark matter at masses below 1 MeV/c², achieving a much finer energy resolution than the kilogram-scale HV detectors. Similar to the HV detectors, HVeV detectors hold silicon crystals (though scaled down to the order of one gram) that observe nuclear and electron recoils by directing phonon energy into highly sensitive transition-edge sensors (TESs), and amplify signals from electron-hole pairs produced by recoils using applied voltage to induce the Neganov-Trofimov-Luke effect. HVeV Run 5 employed the latest HVeV detectors in a four-month data-taking campaign in 2024 at SNOLAB's CUTE facility, including a ten-day dark matter search, and have demonstrated world-class sensitivity at low masses, enabling a new analysis that reaches yet unprobed regions of the dark matter parameter space. This presentation will cover the latest results from analyzing the detectors' performance and the resulting search data.
Beyond serving as a dark matter search in its own right, the applications of this work are twofold: firstly developing an understanding of the behaviour of the silicon crystal design and its detector response, both useful for SuperCDMS; and secondly advancing the state of the art of TES-based cryogenic detectors, which find broad use outside of dark matter searches for detecting photons, neutrons, or even neutrinos.
| mason.buchanan@mail.utoronto.ca | |
| Affiliation | University of Toronto |
| Research Theme | Dark Matter |