Speaker
Javier Tiffenberg
(Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))
Description
The DAMIC experiment uses high resistivity, fully depleted CCD's as
detectors to search for dark matter particles. The low electronic
readout noise (RMS ~2 electrons) of the CCD's make possible to reach a
detection threshold below 50 eV of deposited energy by nuclear recoils
in the silicon target. Owing to these characteristics, DAMIC has an
unrivaled sensitivity to WIMPs with masses below 10 GeV. Early DAMIC runs
demonstrated the high energy resolution, low energy threshold, and power
for background characterizaction of CCDs, and also achieved the world's
best cross-section limits on WIMPs with masses below 4 GeV. These results
motivated the construction of DAMIC100, which will have a target mass of
100 grams of silicon and will be installed in SNOLAB during the Summer of
2014. This new detector will directly test the parameter space
corresponding to the recent results obtained by CoGeNT and by CDMS-Si,
which may be hinting at the presence of a low mass WIMP signal. In this
talk we will discuss the challenges associated with the scale-up of the
experiment, its current status, and the prospects for the first physics
results after a one year run.
Primary author
Javier Tiffenberg
(Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US))
