DMUK meeting at Birmingham

Thursday 5 May 2022, 09:00 → 19:00 Europe/London

This is a 1-day meeting for the UK's Dark Matter community to meet up, present research, and discuss the latest progress in the field.

The meeting will take place from 10am-5pm at the University of Birmingham campus, in the Arts building Lecture Room 3 (127) [building R16 in the campus map here].
The campus can be easily reached by train through the "University" station. 
Sat-nav postcode for the North East Car Park is B15 2SA. 

Participants may attend in person or online via zoom. Please indicate on the registration form if you are planning to attend in person or online.

Please submit an abstract if you would like to give a talk. We particularly encourage talks from younger members of the community.

The deadline for registration is noon on Wednesday 26th April.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Astroparticle Physics group of the Institute of Physics.

09:00 → 10:00 Arrivial period - coffee will be served

10:00 → 12:00 Session 1

Convener: Ioannis Katsioulas (University of Birmingham)

10:00 Introduction

Speaker: Christopher McCabe (King's College London)

10:10 Status and Plans for Dark Matter work at Boulby underground Laboratory.

Update on work underway and planned at Boulby underground Laboratory. In particular Dark Matter related studies

Speaker: Sean Paling

10:30 Neutron spectroscopy with Spherical Proportional Counters in Boulby

Speakers: Ioannis Manthos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Ioannis Manthos, Ioannis Manthos (University of Birmingham (GB))

Manthos_neutrons.pdf

10:50 Muon-induced background in a next-generation dark matter experiment based on liquid xenon

Muon-induced neutrons can lead to potentially irreducible backgrounds in rare event search experiments. We have investigated the implication of laboratory depth on the muon induced background in a future dark matter experiment capable of reaching the so-called neutrino floor. Our simulation study focuses on a xenon-based detector with 70 tonnes of active mass, surrounded by additional veto systems plus a water shield. Two locations at the Boulby Underground Laboratory (UK) were analysed as examples: an experimental cavern in salt at a depth of 2850 m w. e. (similar to the location of the existing laboratory), and a deeper laboratory located in polyhalite rock at a depth of 3575 m w. e. Our results show that no cosmogenic background events are likely to survive standard analysis cuts for 10 years of operation at either location. The largest background component that we identified comes from delayed neutron emission from N-17 which is produced from F-19 in the fluoropolymer components of the experiment. Our results confirm that a dark matter search with sensitivity to the neutrino floor is viable (from the point of view of cosmogenic backgrounds) in underground laboratories at these levels of rock overburden

Speaker: Vitaly Kudryavtsev

LXe-G3-muons-VK-DMUK-may2022.pdf

11:10 When the Evaporation of Primordial Black Holes Messes Up with Dark Matter Production

In this talk, I will present the phenomenology of dark-matter production in the case where it is both produced by thermal processes and by the evaporation of primordial black holes. I will show how the evaporation of primordial black holes may dramatically affect the production of dark-matter particles as well as its phase-space distribution. I will also show that the population of DM particles produced by evaporation may be warm enough to re-thermalize with the pre-existing DM relic abundance, leading to non-trivial imprints on the value of the relic abundance at a later time.

Speaker: Lucien Heurtier (IPPP, Durham, England)

Heurtier2022.pdf

11:30 Design of a compact SiPM array for the Xenia detector

Liquid xenon time projection chambers (LXe-TPCs) have set leading limits on dark matter scattering over the past two decades. These have so far employed low-background photomultiplier tubes to detect the xenon VUV luminescence. With SiPMs now yielding competitive photon detection performance in the VUV, the possibility of using this technology in the next generation of experiments is becoming more realistic, at least in some parts of the experiment. An outline of the design of a prototype array of sensors for the Xenia LXe-TPC being built at Imperial is discussed. The design is driven in particular by the requirements to achieve high spatial resolution and potential for ultra-low radioactive backgrounds, and will provide a test-bed for the development of end-to-end signal chains. Our more immediate aim is to explore possibilities for track-topology resolution in liquid xenon, in particular in conjunction with hydrogen-doping, which may help decrease gamma-ray backgrounds in neutrinoless double-beta decay searches in Xe-136

Speaker: Andrew Stevens (Imperial College London)

XenonFutures SiPM Array-DMUK-5May22.pdf

11:45 Intergalactic Dark Matter

We discuss PBHs as dark matter, including not only in galaxies and clusters of galaxies but extremely massive PBHs which may allow the total entropy to reach the maximum holographic value

Speaker: Paul Frampton (University of Salento)

12:00 → 13:00 Lunch

13:00 → 14:50 Session 1: Session 2

Convener: Christopher McCabe (King's College London)

13:00 FlameNEST: Explicit Profile Likelihoods with the Noble Element Simulation Technique

We present FlameNEST, a framework providing explicit likelihood evaluations in noble element particle detectors using data-driven models from the Noble Element Simulation Technique. FlameNEST provides a way to perform statistical analyses on real data with no dependence on large, computationally expensive Monte Carlo simulations by evaluating the likelihood on an event-by-event basis using analytic probability elements convolved together in a single TensorFlow multiplication. Furthermore, this robust framework creates opportunities for simple inter-collaborative analyses which will be fundamental for the future of experimental dark matter physics

Speaker: Robert James (UCL)

DMUK 2022 talk RJ.pdf

13:20 SAMBA: A cross-platform DAQ software for rare-event searches

Speaker: Mark William Slater (University of Birmingham (GB))

SambaIntroDMUK_May2022_new.pdf

13:35 Searching for dilaton fields in the Ly$\alpha$ forest

Dilatons (and moduli) couple to the masses and coupling constants of ordinary matter, and these quantities are fixed by the local value of the dilaton field. If, in addition, the dilaton with mass $m_\phi$ contributes to the cosmic dark matter density, then such quantities oscillate in time at the dilaton Compton frequency. We show how these oscillations lead to broadening and shifting of the Voigt profile of the Ly$\alpha$ forest, in a manner that is correlated with the local dark matter density. We further show how tomographic methods allow the effect to be reconstructed by observing the Ly$\alpha$ forest spectrum of distant quasars. We then simulate a large number of quasar lines of sight using the lognormal density field, and forecast the ability of future astronomical surveys to measure this effect. We find that in the ultra low mass range $10^{-32}\text{ eV}\leq m_\phi\leq 10^{-28}\text{ eV}$ upcoming observations can improve over existing limits to the dilaton electron mass and fine structure constant couplings set by fifth force searches by up to five orders of magnitude. Our projected limits apply assuming that the ultralight dilaton makes up a few percent of the dark matter density, consistent with upper limits set by the cosmic microwave background anisotropies

Speaker: Louis Hamaide

20min UKDM - LH presentation 05-22.pdf

13:50 DM searches in colliders

Speaker: James Frost (University of Oxford (GB))

DMUK_LHC.pdf

14:10 Status of the MIGDAL experiment

Speaker: Tom Neep (University of Birmingham (GB))

migdal-dmuk.pdf

14:30 Progress report on the QSHS hidden sector dark matter project

We report on the first 15 months of the QSHS project, an STFC funded collaboration building a UK based apparatus searching for wave-like dark matter in our galactic halo.

Speaker: Ian Bailey (Lancaster University / Cockcroft Institute of Accelerator Science and Technology)

DMUK_May2022.pdf

14:50 → 15:30 Coffee break

15:30 → 17:00 Session 1: Session 3

Convener: Konstantinos Nikolopoulos (University of Birmingham (GB))

15:30 Status of the DarkSide-20k experiment

Speaker: Daria Santone (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Status of the DARKISE-20k experiment-2.pdf

15:50 Status of the NEWS-G experiment

Speaker: Patrick Ryan Knights (University of Birmingham (GB))

dmuk_2022_may_newg_knights.pdf

16:10 Status of the LZ experiment

Speaker: Sally Shaw (UCSB)

LZStatus_DMUK_2022.pdf

16:30 Quantum-enhanced interferometry for axion searches

We will discuss an experiment for searching axions and axion-like-particles in the galactic halo using quantum-enhanced interferometry. This setup will search for axions in the mass range from 10−16 eV up to 10−12 eV using an optical cavity. The sensitivity will be enhanced using squeezed states of light similar to the gravitational-wave detectors. The proposed experiment has the potential to be further scaled up to a multi-km long detector. I will discuss the current status and future plans of the experiment.

Speaker: Denis Martynov (University of Birmingham)

Axions.pdf

16:45 QSNET project: A network of clocks for measuring the stability of fundamental constants

The QSNET consortium is building a UK network of next-generation atomic and molecular clocks that will achieve unprecedented sensitivity in testing variations of the fine structure constant, alpha , and the electron-to-proton mass ratio, μ. In the range of parameters probed, either we will discover new physics, or we will impose new constraints on violations of fundamental symmetries and a range of theories beyond the Standard Model, including dark matter and dark energy models.

Speaker: Leonid Prokhorov (University of Birmingham)

220504_DMUK_QSNET_LP.pdf