Phenomenology 2022 Symposium: From Virtual to Real

Session

DM II

9 May 2022, 16:30

Lawrence Hall 104

Conveners

DM II

• Christina Gao
• Christina Gao

208. The Phonon Background from Gamma Rays in Sub-GeV Dark Matter Detectors

Mukul Sholapurkar

09/05/2022, 16:30

Direct detection experiments looking for a scattering signal have gained sensitivity to dark matter as light as ~MeV. A promising strategy for lowering the threshold to the keV-scale is to look for meV-scale phonons in solid-state targets. Such experiments will however be subject to backgrounds from high-energy photons. Radioactive contaminants can emit gamma rays that can scatter in the...

186. Looking for ultraheavy dark matter in geological quartz

Anubhav Mathur (Johns Hopkins University)

09/05/2022, 16:45

The non-observation of the simplest dark matter candidates has motivated searches for a wider range of alternatives. One possibility is self-interactions within the dark sector causing dark matter to clump into heavy composite states. Their corresponding low number density poses a challenge for existing direct detection experiments due to the highly suppressed event rate. In this talk, I...

162. Dark Matter Searches with Integrated Optics

Ryan Janish (Fermilab)

09/05/2022, 17:00

Integrated optical chips containing large numbers of optical micro-resonators provide a powerful method to search for axion and hidden photon dark matter in the mass range 0.1 meV to 5 eV. Such chips have a large effective detector volume with high-finesse photon resonances at the visible and near-IR wavelengths associated with these dark matter masses. Further, they readily allow the use of...

160. Inelastic Dipole Dark Matter at FASER

Max Fieg

09/05/2022, 17:15

Inelastically coupled dark matter has the well-known advantage of evading direct detection bounds, given a sufficient mass splitting $\Delta$ between 2 dark states, $\chi_1, \chi_0$. One of the simplest couplings one can add to the standard model (with no additional dark states) are the non-renormalizable dipole operators, where $\chi_0,\chi_1$ inelastically couple to the SM photon. This...

63. DarkQuest - Searching for light dark matter at Fermilab's proton fixed-target experiment

Yongbin Feng (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))

09/05/2022, 17:30

Accelerator-based dark matter searches provide a unique opportunity to expand the sensitivity to the sub-GeV mass regime. In this region, there are existing opportunities to search for dark sector signatures, mediators, and the dark matter itself, that are unconstrained. DarkQuest is a proton fixed-target experiment that would use a high-intensity beam of 120 GeV protons to produce dark sector...

58. New Directions in Direct Detection: Towards the Mesoscale

Carlos Blanco

09/05/2022, 17:45

As the age of WIMP-scale dark matter (DM) draws to a close thanks to the ever-increasing sensitivity of direct detection experiments, the majority of DM parameter space outside of the weak scale remains to be explored. Sub-GeV DM can excite electronic transitions in a variety of molecular and nano-scale systems which have sub-eV scale thresholds. Quantum dots are nanocrystals of semiconducting...

13. Maximizing Direct Detection with HYPER Dark Matter

Robert McGehee

09/05/2022, 18:00

We estimate the maximum direct detection cross section for sub-GeV dark matter scattering off nucleons. For dark matter masses in the range of $10 \text{ keV} − 100 \text{ MeV}$, cross sections greater than $10^{−36} - 10^{−30} \text{ cm}^2$ seem implausible. We introduce a dark matter candidate which realizes this maximum cross section: HighlY interactive ParticlE Relics (HYPERs). After...

4. Probing Invisible Vector Meson Decays with NA64 and LDMX

Kevin Zhou (Stanford University)

09/05/2022, 18:15

Electron beam fixed target experiments such as NA64 and LDMX use missing energy-momentum to detect the production of dark matter and other long-lived states. The most studied production mechanism is dark Bremsstrahlung through a vector mediator. In this talk, we introduce a complementary source of missing energy-momentum signals: Bremsstrahlung photons can convert to hard vector mesons in...