The Yossef Dothan Memorial Lecture: "Direct Detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter: A New Frontier "

 

Professor Rouven Essig
C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics
Stony Brook University, New York, USA

 

 

14 May 2023, 14:00 
Melamed Hall (6), Shenkar Physics Building 
Free
Lecture

Professor Rouven Essig is a Guest Lecturer at the Emilio Segre Distinguished Lectures in Physics endowed by Raymond and Beverly Sackler for the academic year 2022/2023, delivering the annual Yossef Dothan Memorial Lecture.

 

Abstract

Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in our Universe, but we have yet to learn its identity. While most experimental searches focus on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with masses above the proton (about 1 GeV/c^2), many natural dark-matter candidates have masses below the proton and are invisible in traditional WIMP searches. In this talk, I will discuss the search for dark matter with masses between about 500 keV/c^2 to 1 GeV/c^2 (“sub-GeV dark matter”), which has seen tremendous progress in the last few years. I will describe several direct-detection strategies, and discuss how to search for dark matter interactions with electrons and nuclei in various target materials, such as noble liquids and semiconductors. I will in particular highlight SENSEI, a funded experiment that uses ultra-low-threshold silicon CCD detectors (“Skipper CCDs”) capable of detecting even single electrons. I will describe the latest results from SENSEI, and how SENSEI and other experiments expect to probe orders of magnitude of novel dark matter parameter space in the next few years.

 

Tel Aviv University makes every effort to respect copyright. If you own copyright to the content contained
here and / or the use of such content is in your opinion infringing, Contact us as soon as possible >>