Motivations for the Directional Detection of Dark Matter

  • Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars

April 8, 2025 2:00 PM - April 8, 2025 3:00 PM
PAIS 3205

Host:
Dinesh Loomba
Presenter:
Wesley Thompson (UNM)
Zoom link
The search for dark matter remains one of the foremost challenges in modern physics, with a multitude of theories concerning the nature of dark matter leaving a vast parameter space for experimentalists to explore. WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) are a well motivated candidate for dark matter that satisfy many astronomical observations and are included in natural extensions of the Standard Model. The direct detection of WIMPs involves looking for faint signals induced by WIMP-nucleon scattering. Much progress has been made in this field since direct searches began, however future progress requires probing lower WIMP-Nucleon cross sections.  At a certain point in this parameter space, dark matter induced nuclear recoils will become indistinguishable from those caused by solar neutrinos. A promising solution to navigate below this “neutrino floor” relies on the assumption that as our solar system traverses through the galaxy, we should be experiencing a wind of dark matter coming from the constellation Cygnus. The Earth’s rotation produces a modulation in the direction of dark matter, which can be used to discriminate between neutrino backgrounds and dark matter signals. In this talk I will discuss the detector technologies capable of detecting the directionality of dark matter induced signals and make the case that gaseous TPCs are the most mature for this task. Directional detection depends heavily on our ability to reconstruct the 3D vector direction of nuclear recoils. Therefore, I will also discuss how directionality is reconstructed and the challenges associated with low energy nuclear recoils.

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