High Energy Physics Seminar

While the case for dark matter continues to strengthen from the astrophysical side, particle dark matter has so far eluded the current generation of experiments, designed to probe the SUSY-motivated mass range of GeV-TeV scale dark matter. Meanwhile, the LHC has ruled out the simpler SUSY models, and the simple picture of a weak-scale, 30 GeV supersymmetric dark matter particle has begun to fade. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in the search for Sub-GeV dark matter down to MeV-scale masses, and the path forward to new technologies capable of probing down to keV-scale mass fermionic dark matter scattering and meV-scale mass bosonic dark matter absorption. These include, but are not limited to, the use of superconductors as well as novel semiconductors as the target medium and readout stages.  The energy resolution required to search for low-mass dark matter makes these technologies interesting as general imaging techniques for infrared and UV astronomy, as well as for coherent neutrino scattering and other low-energy rare event search experiments, and I will briefly touch on applications of these new technologies to those fields.