Searches for light dark matter in liquified noble gases and silicon detectors

• Grant number: 24/08123-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2024
• End date: March 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - Elementary Particle Physics and Fields
• Principal Investigator: Edivaldo Moura Santos
• Grantee: Pedro Zilves Maio Ventura
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física (IF). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 21/11489-7 - Dark matter searches, AP.ESP

Abstract

The PhD project being proposed here focuses on the search for signals associated to the scattering of dark matter with the nucleus or the electrons of liquified noble gases, like argon (LAr) and xenon (LXe), as well as silicon. In the case of liquified noble gases, these signals are expected to be detected in the form of scintillation or ionization in double-phase time projection chambers (TPC). For silicon, a promising technique is the one based on fully-depleted CCDs where the scattering would give rise to diffusion limited events. Given that the regions of the parameter space for dark matter masses above 10 GeV/c2 have been strongly constrained, the attention turns now to the sub-GeV region and in this region a hypothetical interaction of the dark matter with electrons is also under consideration. Therefore, special attention will be devoted to quantifying the sensitivity of future TPC-based experiments using LAr as DarkSide-20k. The perspectives for experiments based on fully-depleted CCDs with extremely low readout noise (Skipper CCDs) as those employed by CONNIE and OSCURA will be explored as well.