Conveners
Dark Matter: Parallel 2
- Shawn Westerdale (University of California, Riverside)
Dark Matter: Parallel 9: Joint DM/neutrinos
- There are no conveners in this block
Dark Matter: Parallel 5
- Alvaro Chavarria (University of Washington)
Dark Matter: Parallel 8
- Hugh Lippincott (UCSB)
The PICO collaboration operates bubble chambers to search for WIMP dark matter, leveraging the excellent gamma rejection and long live fractions enabled by operating at a lower degree of superheat than the bubble chambers of the 1960s. This advancement allows for significantly improved background rejection while maintaining sensitivity to nuclear recoils. Located at the SNOLAB underground...
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is developing liquid-noble bubble chambers sensitive to sub-keV nuclear recoils. These detectors extend the excellent electron-recoil insensitivity inherent in bubble chambers with the additional ability to reconstruct energy based on the scintillation signal for further background reduction. The targeted nuclear recoil threshold of 100 eV...
Liquid argon (LAr) scintillator-based detectors are used to search for WIMP dark matter by looking for light emission from WIMP-nucleon interactions in the target volume. The DEAP-3600 LAr dark matter detector has operated since 2016 at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada, and has previously contained 3.3 tonnes of LAr scintillator target. It has a background rate below one event per tonne-year, and set...
LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a direct detection experiment located a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, USA. LZ utilizes a dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC) with a 7-tonne active volume of liquid xenon. The TPC is surrounded by a veto system, composed of an instrumented liquid xenon skin and an outer detector with gadolinium-loaded liquid scintillator...
The total mass and distribution of dark matter within the Solar system are poorly known, albeit constraints from measurements of planetary orbits exist. We have discovered, however, that different sorts of determinations of the Sun’s gravitational quadrupole moment can combine to yield new and highly sensitive constraints on the mass distribution within Mercury’s orbit. These outcomes provide...
The DEAP-3600 experiment, located 2 km deep underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada, is a single-phase liquid argon (LAr) detector primarily designed for the direct detection of dark matter. The detector consists of a 3.3-tonne LAr contained within a spherical acrylic vessel and instrumented with 255 high-efficiency photomultiplier tubes. Since 2019, the experiment has set the most stringent...
Thanks to their sub-keV energy threshold and excellent background discrimination, liquid xenon (LXe) dual-phase time projection chambers (TPCs) are the leading technology in the search for GeV-scale WIMP dark matter. However, these same properties also make them well suited not only for WIMPs, but for detecting other rare and faint phenomena, such as the coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus...
The XLZD collaboration—combining the XENON, LZ, and DARWIN efforts—is developing a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber with 60–80 tonnes of active mass, designed to reach WIMP-nucleon cross-section sensitivities down to the neutrino floor. Beyond dark matter, XLZD will also operate as a rare-event observatory. This talk presents XLZD's projected sensitivity to neutrinoless double beta...
Recent years have seen a dramatic expansion in ideas regarding the nature of dark matter, extending beyond the weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP) paradigm. Many of these theories predict minuscule couplings between light (sub-GeV mass) dark matter and the Standard Model, which direct detection experiments can search for. In this talk we will begin by reviewing the status of current...
Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs), particularly in their Skipper-CCD configuration, are silicon-based detectors capable of single-electron sensitivity and eV-scale energy thresholds. These properties make them promising candidates for direct detection of certain low mass dark matter candidates and coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS). A critical requirement for such...
Directionally sensitive detectors present a unique opportunity to probe models of Dark matter lighter than a proton, a regime largely inaccessible to current experimental techniques. Recently, molecular crystals have emerged as particularly well-suited anisotropic detector materials. This talk will review the importance of directionality and the search for daily modulating signals in the hunt...
The Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX) is an axion haloscope located at the University of Washington in Seattle. It is the first axion haloscope to reach benchmark KSVZ and DFSZ axion models and one of the few experiments on earth that can detect QCD axions. In this talk I will outline the motivation for QCD axions as a dark matter candidate, explain how ADMX aims to detect them, and review...
The axion is a well-motivated dark matter candidate that can be detected by its interaction with externally applied magnetic fields. The DMRadio program searches for axions with masses below 1 $\mu$eV using large magnets, high quality factor resonators, and precision sensing techniques. In this talk, I will discuss the DMRadio program, including the commissioning progress of DMRadio-50L, the...
Axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) are hypothetical particles predicted by various BSM theories, which also make one of the dark matter candidates. If ALPs exist in nature, the CMB photons as they pass through galaxy clusters will convert to ALPs (of mass range $10^{-14}$ to $10^{-11}$ eV), resulting in a polarized spectral distortion in the CMB, and an astrophysics dependent non-Gaussian...
Astrophysical neutrinos offer a unique window into the most distant and energetic environments in the universe. With an energy scale spanning TeV—PeV, and cosmological baselines, they allow us to probe a parameter space not easily accessible to colliders. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica has been detecting a steady flux of astrophysical neutrinos — in addition to the atmospheric...
The upcoming IceCube Upgrade will provide unprecedented sensitivity to dark matter particles that accumulate and annihilate in the core of the Sun. In this talk, I will present our recent study showing that the upgrade will enable tests of parameter space beyond the reach of existing direct detection experiments. This improvement applies in particular to dark matter candidates with...
The leading dark matter (DM) experiments are seeing hints of nuclear recoils from coherent scattering with solar neutrinos, and will soon enter the so-called neutrino fog.
Discrimination against this background will require detectors that can measure recoil directions to distinguish solar neutrino signals from those of Galactic DM. Of current technologies employed to detect this directional...
Recent high-energy laser experiments in the United States have indicated a composite matter/antimatter hadron structure for "matter" in the Universe. The cosmological implications of this novel hadron model are profound. The model provides a persuasive explanation for both Dark Energy and Dark Matter, along with explanations for a number of other significant unexplained observations (the...
Diverse dark matter candidates, including axion-like particles (ALPs), MeV-scale thermal relics, and primordial black holes, produce MeV gamma-ray signals through their decay, annihilation, or evaporation processes. Indirect searches for these signals have been impeded by limited astrophysical observing capability in the MeV regime. The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) will provide new...
The nature of dark matter is one of the great open questions in physics. The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) experiment is an Antarctic balloon mission optimized specifically for low energy (< 0.25 GeV/n) cosmic antinuclei as uniquely low-background signatures of dark matter. In particular, the production of low-energy astrophysical antideuterons is suppressed by the low abundance of...
