Speaker
Description
Located at the 4850' level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, SD, the Majorana Demonstrator (MJD) experiment is searching for neutrinoless double beta decay in Ge-76 with high-purity Germanium (HPGe) detectors. The combination of low-activity materials of the Demonstrator and careful control of cosmic-ray exposure to the enriched Ge detectors have resulted in a low-background level throughout the entire energy spectrum starting from ~1 keV. The Demonstrator has achieved excellent energy resolution and low energy thresholds for the HPGe detectors, and the experiment has a compelling low-energy physics program with sensitivity to dark matter and axion searches. Multiple competitive searches of physics beyond the standard model are carried out with the MJD commissioning data at low-energies. MJD physics datasets taken later have factor of several reduction in the background at low energy, which enables improved and additional rare-event searches. In this talk, we will discuss the status of rare-event searches of the Majorana Demonstrator with a focus on dark matter candidates.
