Detecting Sub-GeV Dark Matter with Superconducting Nanowires
Name
PhysRevLett.123.151802.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
561.4 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
30088a3bf33d10014cfd0097c8f2cb2e
Author(s)
Hochberg, Yonit
Charaev, Ilya
Nam, Sae-Woo
Verma, Varun
Colangelo, Marco
Berggren, Karl K
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. We propose the use of superconducting nanowires as both target and sensor for direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter. With excellent sensitivity to small energy deposits on electrons and demonstrated low dark counts, such devices could be used to probe electron recoils from dark matter scattering and absorption processes. We demonstrate the feasibility of this idea using measurements of an existing fabricated tungsten-silicide nanowire prototype with 0.8-eV energy threshold and 4.3 ng with 10 000 s of exposure, which showed no dark counts. The results from this device already place meaningful bounds on dark matter-electron interactions, including the strongest terrestrial bounds on sub-eV dark photon absorption to date. Future expected fabrication on larger scales and with lower thresholds should enable probing of new territory in the direct detection landscape, establishing the complementarity of this approach to other existing proposals.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVLETT.123.151802
