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Description
f-electrons have weak orbital overlap between their orbitals and neighboring ligand orbitals, which naturally results in materials with small electronic energy scales (low band gaps, small Fermi velocities, etc), making them promising detector candidates for low-mass dark matter for which they are kinetically extremely well matched. Furthermore, they possess anisotropic velocities and dielectric constants, which would enable background discrimination in directional searches. Lastly, some heavy fermion superconductors have nodes in the superconducting gap that will allow for the excitation of quasiparticles from arbitrarily small excitations. Consequently, our hypothesis is that heavy fermion superconductors provide enhanced flexibility and increased sensitivity for low threshold quantum detectors. Here we present an update on our work to develop Eu based Zintl compounds as narrow band gap detectors. In addition, we report on the fabrication and preliminary results of thin film CeCoIn5 kinetic inductance detectors.