Review of dark matter direct detection experiments

Pramana

Rupak Mahapatra1¹ 

[1] Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA$$

关键词: Dark matter;    direct detection;    phonon;    ionization;    scintillation;    Ge;    xenon;    argon.;   

DOI  :  

学科分类：物理（综合）

来源: Indian Academy of Sciences

【 摘 要 】

Matter, as we know it, makes up less than 5% of the Universe. Various astrophysical observations have confirmed that one quarter of the Universe and most of the matter content in the Universe is made up of dark matter. The nature of dark matter is yet to be discovered and is one of the biggest questions in physics. Particle physics combined with astrophysical measurements of the abundance gives rise to a dark matter candidate called weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP). The low density of WIMPs in the galaxies and the extremely weak nature of the interaction with ordinary matter make detection of the WIMP an extraordinarily challenging task, with abundant fakes from various radioactive and cosmogenic backgrounds with much stronger electromagnetic interaction. The extremely weak nature of the WIMP interaction dictates detectors that have extremely low naturally occurring radioactive background, a large active volume (mass) of sensitive detector material to maximize statistics, a highly efficient detector-based rejection mechanism for the dominant electromagnetic background and sophisticated analysis techniques to reject any residual background. This paper reviews currently available major technologies being pursued by various collaborations, with special emphasis on the cryogenic Ge detector technology used by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search Collaboration (CDMS).

【 授权许可】

Unknown