Conveners
DM II
- James Dent (Sam Houston State University)
The XENON1T direct dark matter search experiment is a dual-phase xenon Time Projection Chamber used to search for WIMP interactions in a 2-ton active liquid xenon target. With a recent series of publications, the XENON collaboration has used a tonne-year exposure of XENON1T, with the lowest background rate of any current dark matter search experiment, to constrain leading models of WIMP...
In fermionic dark matter (DM) models with pseudoscalar mediators, the tree-level amplitude for the DM-nucleon elastic scattering is suppressed by the momentum transfer in the non-relativistic limit. However, it is not suppressed at the loop level, and thus the loop corrections are essential to discuss the sensitivities of the direct detection experiments for the model prediction. In...
Current dark matter direct detection searches can be split into two broad classes: elastic scattering and absorption, with the latter reserved purely for bosonic dark matter. In this work, we study a new class of signal: absorption of fermionic dark matter. We present the lowest-dimension operators which make this possible, their implications, and their simple UV completions. Most importantly,...
I will present new constraints on dark matter in the eV-to-GeV mass scale range, obtained by a prototype detector of the Sub-Electron-Noise Skipper-CCD Experimental Instrument (SENSEI). We took our first data in 2018 searching for dark matter-electron interactions in silicon and observe how many electrons are excited across the silicon band gap per event. We found no events with three or more...
Scatterings both on electrons and nuclei of the Earth crust, atmosphere, and shielding attenuate the expected local dark matter flux at a terrestrial detector. Such experiments lose sensitivity to dark matter above some critical cross section, and do not probe potentially stronger interactions. In this talk, I consider a simple model of the dark sector with a dark photon in the two limits of...
Recently, we proposed paleo-detectors as a method for the direct detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter. In paleo-detectors, one would search for the persistent traces left by dark matter-nucleon interactions in ancient minerals. For sufficiently radiopure target materials obtained from boreholes deep enough to avoid cosmogenic backgrounds, we identify (broadly...
Recently, we proposed paleo-detectors as a method for the direct
detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter.
Instead of searching for DM induced nuclear recoils in a real-time
laboratory experiment, we propose to search for the traces of DM
interactions recorded in ancient minerals over geological time-scales.
The large integration times of paleo-detectors would allow...
If dark matter is composed of primordial black holes, such black holes can span an enormous range of masses. A variety of observational constraints exist on massive black holes, while black holes with masses below $10^{15}\,\mathrm{g}$ are often assumed to have completely evaporated by the present day. If the evaporation process halts at the Planck scale it would leave behind a stable relic,...
