Exploring the Unexplored: Searching for Dark Matter in the mass range from 10meV-1GeV - Livestream

Substantial astronomical observations have established that approximately 25% of the energy density of the universe is composed of cold non-baryonic dark matter, whose detection and characterization could be key to improving our understanding of the laws of physics. Over the past three decades, physicists have largely focused on searching for dark matter within the 10 GeV-1 TeV range (WIMPs), unfortunately without success. Over the past decade, the theoretical physics community has developed a variety of viable dark matter models with mass in the range of 10meV-1GeV and now the race is on to develop the detector technology and search this nearly completely unexplored parameter space. In this talk, we’ll discuss the experimental requirements when searching for dark matter throughout themass range. We’ll also discuss recent R&D breakthroughs in athermal phonon sensor technology that will enable the newly funded DOE experiments SPICE and HeRALD, as well as the SuperCDMS experiment to search for dark matter in this range.

Speaker: Matt Pyle, UC Berkeley

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