WIMP dark matter particles are expected to interact with liquid xenon producing nuclear recoils (NRs). It is critical for dark matter experiments to have accurate calibration of the detector response and correct modeling of xenon microphysics. The Migdal effect theorizes that when an atom is recoiling, an electron could be emitted, leading to ionization and greater energy deposition. This...
The DarkNESS (Dark Matter Nano-satellite Equipped with Skipper Sensors) mission will deploy a skipper-CCD CubeSat Observatory to search for dark matter (DM) from Low Earth Orbit. During its time in orbit, DarkNESS will observe the Galactic Center to probe O(keV) X-rays from decaying DM models, as well as perform a direct search for electron recoils from strongly-interacting sub-GeV DM. The...
Recent measurements have demonstrated that superconducting qubit decoherence is affected by radiation. As a result, many groups around the world are working to better understand the relationship between different types of radiation and qubit response. This crucial to quantum error correction because radiation can cause correlated loss of information across multiple qubits on a chip, defeating...
A new experimental setup for low mass particle dark matter searches has been installed at the Kamioka underground facility, with an overburden of 2700 m.w.e. Ambient gamma and neutron background levels have measured. A dilution refrigerator is operational with gamma and neutron shielding under construction. Geant simulations predict backgrounds of 10 events/kg/keV/day with this setup. Multiple...
In the last years, rare event searches hunting light dark matter particles or neutrinos via coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) have pushed their thresholds down to eV-scales. However, with the lower thresholds, the experiments started to measure events above their expected background level. These low-energy EXCESSES typically steeply rise towards low energies and...
The characteristic energy of a relic dark matter interaction with a detector scales strongly with the putative dark matter mass. Consequently, experimental search sensitivity at the lightest masses will always come from interactions whose size is similar to noise fluctuations and low energy backgrounds in the detector. In this talk, we will tackle this problem under two essential scenarios,...
