Speaker
Description
The SuperCDMS experiment is a leading experiment in the direct search for Weakly Interacting Massive dark matter Particles (WIMPs) focusing on masses below about 10 GeV/c^2. The search method is based on deploying ultra-pure germanium and silicon detectors at cryogenic temperatures in a well-shielded environment. The WIMPs are detected via lattice vibrations induced by their elastic scattering off of atomic nuclei. For the new phase at SNOLAB, SuperCDMS is aiming to push the energy threshold for particle detection from the keV to the eV scale. I will discuss first studies towards a new proposed calibration method utilizing infrared photons rather the radioactive sources with the long-term goal to excited individual electron-hole pairs, mapping the energy scale down to about 1 eV.
