Sunil Golwala - Caltech - Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors as a Tool for Low-Mass Dark Matter

US/Central
F-108 (BLDG 362)

F-108

BLDG 362

Description
Work in the past few years has revealed a myriad of new prospects for searching for low mass dark matter: it now looks possible to use particle detection techniques to search for thermal relic dark matter down to the few keV cosmological lower bound and to search for non-thermally produced bosonic dark matter in the meV to eV range. Such searches, however, require detection of miniscule quanta, down to the meV energy scale, strongly motivating the use of cryogenic sensing techniques. Microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) are a promising technology for such searches given their inherent expected sensitivity. Their inherent multiplexability may also be crucial given that such small energy depositions require gram (or smaller) scale individual detectors: large arrays would be needed to build up even kilogram target masses. We will discuss the fundamental limits to MKID-based architectures and current progress on developing them.
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