Speakers
Prof.
Jeffrey Filippini
(UIUC)Dr
Noah Kurinsky
(Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
Description
For decades, we have used materials with sub-eV bandgaps as avalanche photo-diodes, with smaller gap materials allowing for detection of longer wavelength light. These applications have been largely restricted to high-power detection due to high dark rates observed in these detectors at room temperature. Recent progress has been made reducing the dark current by cooling these APDs to LN2 temperatures, at the expense of gain, as the avalanche process and dark rate processes are both temperature dependent. In the meantime, silicon detectors have achieved single-charge resolution at sub-K temperatures using phonon readout, and charge readouts of ~30 electrons have been achieved in monolithic devices. We propose a two-step process to capitalize on these gains for low-gap materials by first testing conventional materials at sub-Kelvin temperature, using these new readout techniques, and then using newly discovered low-gap materials (e.g. ZrTe5) to continue to push thresholds lower. We expect that these materials will either operate as high-gain APDs or highly insulating monolithic crystals; in either case, they are low-lying fruit for low-threshold photon detection, and they make attractive targets for rare-event searches with sub-eV energy depositions, such as keV-MeV mass dark matter searches with unprecedented sensitivity.
Primary authors
Prof.
Jeffrey Filippini
(UIUC)
Dr
Noah Kurinsky
(Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
Prof.
Yonatan Kahn
(UIUC)
Co-authors
Dale Van Harlingen
(UIUC)
Prof.
Fahad Mahmoud
(UIUC)
Prof.
James Eckstein
(UIUC)
Prof.
Lucas Wagner
(UIUC)
Prof.
Peter Abbamonte
(UIUC)
