Related papers: Electrovolt-scale backgrounds from surfaces
Scintillating crystal detector offers potential advantages in low-energy (keV-MeV range) low-background experiments for particle physics and astrophysics. The merits are discussed using CsI(Tl) crystal as illustrations. The various physics…
We describe observations of low energy excess (LEE) events, background events observed in all light dark matter direct detection calorimeters, and noise in a Transition Edge Sensor based two-channel silicon athermal phonon detector with 375…
We estimate the event rate for excitation of atomic transition by photino-like dark matter. For excitations of several eV, this event rate can exceed naive cross-section by many orders of magnitude. Although the event rate for these atomic…
We construct the first comprehensive radioactive background model for a dark matter search with charge-coupled devices (CCDs). We leverage the well-characterized depth and energy resolution of the DAMIC at SNOLAB detector and a detailed…
We present the first results from a dark matter search using six Skipper-CCDs in the SENSEI detector operating at SNOLAB. We employ a bias-mitigation technique of hiding approximately 46% of our total data and aggressively mask images to…
Cryogenic detectors are at the forefront of rare-event search experiments, including direct detection of dark matter, coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, neutrinoless double-beta decay, and searches for fractionally charged…
The CRESST experiment observes an unexplained excess of events at low energies. In the current CRESST-III data-taking campaign we are operating detector modules with different designs to narrow down the possible explanations. In this work,…
Naturally occurring background radiation is a source of correlated decoherence events in superconducting qubits that will challenge error-correction schemes. To characterize the radiation environment in an unshielded laboratory, we…
We consider direct-detection searches for sub-GeV dark matter via electron scatterings in the presence of large interactions between dark and ordinary matter. Scatterings both on electrons and nuclei in the Earth's crust, atmosphere, and…
We hypothesize that avalanche-like releases of energy accumulated in materials due to radioactivity and other sources can produce parasitic background in dark matter particles searches and low-energy threshold detectors. We explore this…
We revisit the detection of luminous dark matter in direct detection experiments. In this scenario, dark matter scatters endothermically to produce an excited state, which decays to produce a photon. We explore ways in which the electron…
Light dark matter with sub-eV masses has a high number density in our galaxy, and its scattering cross section with macroscopic objects can be significantly enhanced by coherence effects. Repeated scattering with a target object can induce…
The sensitivity of astronomical X-ray detectors is limited by the instrumental background. The background is especially important when observing low surface brightness sources that are critical for many of the science cases targeted by…
Low-threshold dark matter detectors, in particular cryogenic detectors based on dielectric materials, are among the best tools for probing sub-GeV dark matter masses. In the coming years detectors of this type will become sensitive to solar…
One of the next frontiers in dark-matter direct-detection experiments is to explore the MeV to GeV mass regime. Such light dark matter does not carry enough kinetic energy to produce an observable nuclear recoil, but it can scatter off…
In a broad class of consistent models, MeV to few-GeV dark matter interacts with ordinary matter through weakly coupled GeV-scale mediators. We show that a suitable meter-scale (or smaller) detector situated downstream of an electron…
If dark matter (DM) particles are lighter than a few MeV/$c^2$ and can scatter off electrons, their interaction within the solar interior results in a considerable hardening of the spectrum of galactic dark matter received on Earth. For a…
We study in detail sub-GeV dark matter scattering off electrons in xenon, including the expected electron recoil spectra and annual modulation spectra. We derive improved constraints using low-energy XENON10 and XENON100 ionization-only…
In a seminal paper now a decade old, it was shown that dark matter detectors geared at probing interactions with nucleons could also be used to probe dark matter interactions with electrons. In this work, we show that new detector concepts…
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment aims to detect rare interactions between dark matter particles and xenon. Although the detector is designed to be the most sensitive to GeV/$c^2$--TeV/$c^2$ Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), it is…