Speaker
M. Carmen Carmona-Benitez
(Pennsylvania State University)
Description
The identification of dark matter is presently one of the greatest challenges in science, fundamental to our understanding of the Universe. In this talk we will present the latest developments in the search for low-mass dark matter with the Snowball chamber. This chamber uses supercooled water as the target, employing an exotic phase transition of metastable water in a similar fashion to a bubble chamber in reverse, but with enhanced low energy threshold (sub-keV) and background discrimination as a function of thermodynamic conditions. We demonstrate that water is supercooled for a significantly shorter time with respect to control data in the presence of neutron sources. Gamma calibration data are indicative of insensitivity to electron recoils inducing the phase transition, making this detector potentially ideal for dark matter searches seeking nuclear recoil alone. The most recent image analysis will be shown with position reconstruction and multiple scattering. We will explore the potential of this new technology to drastically expand detector sensitivity in the sub-GeV range, opening up a new parameter space currently out of reach.
Primary author
M. Carmen Carmona-Benitez
(Pennsylvania State University)
