SB/BNL Joint Cosmo seminar: Javier Tiffenberg, Fermilab: Dark Matter Searches with CCDs and the Sensei Experiment

Thursday 9 Nov 2017, 15:00 → 16:00 US/Eastern

Small Seminar Room (Universe)

In this talk I will describe how CCDs can be used to search for dark matter. In particular, I will describe Skipper CCDs, with which we have achieved an ultra-low readout noise of 0.068 electrons rms/pix. This is the first time that discrete sub-electron readout noise has been achieved reproducibly over millions of pixels on a stable, large-area detector. This allows the precise counting of the number of electrons in each pixel, ranging from pixels with 0 electrons to more than 1500 electrons. The resulting CCD detector is thus an ultra-sensitive calorimeter. It is also capable of counting single photons in the optical and near-infrared regime. As a particle detector, this CCD will have unprecedented sensitivity to low-mass dark matter particles. I will discuss the SENSEI experiment, which will probe vast new regions of unexplored dark-matter parameter space in the next few years.