Searching for Dark Matter with Athermal Phonon Detectors Throughout the Mass Range from 50meV through 500MeV

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. These failures have motivated the DOE to broaden the experimental search program with the very recently announced $24M Dark Matter New Initiatives Program.

In this talk, we’ll discuss the experimental requirements when searching for dark matter throughout the mass range from 50meV- 500 MeV. We’ll also discuss recent R&D breakthroughs in athermal phonon sensor technology that will enable experiments that are being proposed using silicon, polar crystal and superfluid He as the detector material.

Speaker: Matt Pyle, UC Berkeley