Speaker
Description
The null results from searches for standard weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs) have led to a variety of experiments aiming to test alternative dark matter (DM) hypothesis. In particular, several well-motivated DM production models predict sub-GeV candidates, and this fact has promoted a strong international effort to explore such regime.
In this context, the SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment is expected to lead the search for DM particles down to 500 MeV in the near future. This threshold can be further lowered by including the Migdal effect, that refers to the predicted atom ionization following a perturbation of the respective nucleus. Several dedicated experiments, such as MIGDAL, are currently aiming to verify such prediction in order to justify its use in DM searches.
In this talk I will first review the SuperCDMS SNOLAB and MIGDAL experiments. After this introduction, I will present the contributions from my group at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM) to such experiments, that include data analysis, development of experiment infrastructure, and instrumentation. I will finish my presentation with a discussion on the future plans in this field at UAM.
