Speaker
Description
DAMIC-M is a next-generation experiment to search for dark matter with charge coupled devices (CCDs) in the Modane Underground Laboratory in France. It builds on the success of DAMIC at SNOLAB, which pioneered the detection of nuclear and electronic recoils in the bulk silicon of CCDs deployed in a low-background environment. The dominant source of noise in conventional CCDs lie in their readout stage. A modification in the design of this stage makes it possible to measure the ionization charge collected per pixel many times over. Such “skipper" CCDs can resolve individual electrons per pixel, which allows for sensitivity to a few eV of energy deposited in the target. DAMIC-M will feature a tower of fifty of the most massive CCDs ever built with the skipper readout. It will achieve an improvement of several orders of magnitude in the exploration of the dark matter particle hypothesis, in particular of candidates pertaining to the so-called “hidden sector.” In this talk I will summarize the progress toward the DAMIC-M experiment.
