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Searching for Dark Matter with Athermal Phonon Detectors Throughout the Mass Range from 50meV through 500MeV
Matt Pyle, University of California Berkeley
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Substantial astronomical observations have established that approximately 25% of the energy density of the universe is composed of cold non-baryonic dark matter, whose detection and characterization could be key to improving our understanding of the laws of physics. Over the past three decades, physicists have largely focused on searching for dark matter within the 10 GeV-1 TeV range (WIMPs), unfortunately without success. These failures have motivated the DOE to broaden the experimental search program with the very recently announced $24M Dark Matter New Initiatives Program.
In this talk, we’ll discuss the experimental requirements when searching for dark matter throughout the mass range from 50meV- 500 MeV. We’ll also discuss recent R&D breakthroughs in athermal phonon sensor technology that will enable experiments that are being proposed using silicon, polar crystal and superfluid He as the detector material.
About Matt Pyle
Matt Pyle is the Mike Garland Assistant Professor of Physics at University of California Berkeley. He’s a member of the SuperCDMS SNOLAB collaboration as well as 2 newly proposed collaborations that hope to search for single optical phonon and superfluid He roton generation from light dark matter interactions. Matt was a graduate student at Stanford under Blas Cabrera working on CDMS. During this time he developed a love for Mediterranean Wraps on California Avenue and still always tries to grab a falafel or 2 whenever he comes back.
Audience: Public
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