Abstract:
Dark matter physics faces a significant challenge: the once-dominant paradigm of weakly-interacting massive particles has come under pressure from recent experimental results, and numerous dark matter candidates now line a vast range of scales. This is especially problematic for the future of laboratory detection experiments. Decades of development have produced detectors that are extremely sensitive to weak-scale dark matter, but nearly blind to other important targets. The growing scope of the search thus calls for new experimental ideas. I will discuss a new framework for dark matter detection with condensed matter systems that promises to probe dark matter particles with masses as low as the keV scale, where cosmological constraints become relevant. In particular, I will show how the capabilities of novel electron-recoil detectors are determined by their dielectric properties, making it possible to easily leverage the complicated many-body physics of detector materials for a new generation of experiments. This novel formalism is already enabling new approaches to the detection of light dark matter, and I will share recent results based on this method in superconducting detectors. These prospects promise to transform direct detection from a surgical instrument at the weak scale to a robust tool in the search for new physics across the scales.
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