Speaker
Description
With its excellent energy resolution and ultra-low backgrounds, the high-purity germanium detectors in the Majorana Demonstrator enable several searches for beyond the Standard Model physics. These range from the primary neutrinoless double beta decay search to searches for several classes of exotic dark matter models, axions, and tests of quantum mechanical conservation laws. In this talk, we present several of these studies which focus on the low-energy 1–100 keV region of a 37 kg-year exposure collected between May 2016 and November 2019. These enriched germanium detectors were operated in a low-background, ultra-low radioactivity shield and cryostat at a depth of 4300 mwe at the Sanford Underground Research Facility before being transferred to the LEGEND-200 experiment. In this talk, we present new experimental limits for keV-scale sterile neutrino dark matter, fermionic dark matter absorption, sub-GeV dark matter 3-2 body scattering, and bosonic dark matter, and discuss the status of beyond-Standard Model physics searches in germanium detectors.
This material is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, the Particle Astrophysics and Nuclear Physics Programs of the National Science Foundation, and the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
