Conveners
T03: Dark Matter: Part 1
- Laura Lopez-Honorez (Universite Libre de Bruxelles)
T03: Dark Matter: Part 2
- Elisabetta Baracchini (Gran Sasso Science Institute)
T03: Dark Matter: Part 3
- Elisabetta Baracchini (Gran Sasso Science Institute)
- Belina von Krosigk (Universität Hamburg)
T03: Dark Matter: Part 4
- M. Patrick Decowski (Nikhef and the University of Amsterdam)
T03: Dark Matter: Part 5
- Kallia Petraki (LPTHE, Sorbonne)
T03: Dark Matter: Part 6
- M. Patrick Decowski (Nikhef and the University of Amsterdam)
T03: Dark Matter: Part 7
- Laura Lopez-Honorez (Universite Libre de Bruxelles)
- Belina von Krosigk (Universität Hamburg)
Primordial black holes might have existed in the early Universe and, via their evaporation mechanism (completed before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis), they might have released stable particles beyond the Standard Model. We discuss the possibility that such particles might constitute all or a fraction of the dark matter observed today, also considering the bounds on warm dark matter. If sufficiently...
Primordial black holes (PBHs) lighter than $10^9\,$g are at present mostly unconstrained, because they evaporate before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). Hence, they can not represent a fraction of dark matter (DM). However, their evaporation products can leave an imprint on the early universe observables. In this talk, we will decribe how the public code BlackHawk has been adapted to compute...
What is dark matter, the mysterious predominant constituent of all matter in the Universe? As I will show, primordial black holes from the early Universe make an attractive non-particle dark matter candidate, with intimate connections to astronomical puzzles like the origin of heavy elements (gold) as well as ongoing boom in gravity wave and multi-messenger astronomy. In fact, primordial black...
The presence of a non-baryonic Dark Matter (DM) component in the Universe is inferred from the observation of its gravitational interaction. If Dark Matter interacts weakly with the Standard Model (SM) it could be produced at the LHC. The ATLAS experiment has developed a broad search program for DM candidates, including resonance searches for the mediator which would couple DM to the SM,...
Searches for dark matter at colliders are a powerful complementary probe to elucidate the nature of this hitherto unobserved form of matter. We present CMS searches for dark matter candidate particles and new mediators interacting with them. Various final states, topologies, and kinematic variables are explored utilizing the full Run-II data-set collected at the LHC. Furthermore, we interpret...
We present sensitivity of LHC Standard Model (SM) differential cross-section measurements for so-called “stealth dark matter” scenarios occurring in an SU(ND) dark gauge group, where constituents are charged under the SM and ND =2 or 4. The low-energy theory contains mesons which can be produced at the LHC and a scalar baryon dark matter (DM) candidate which cannot. We evaluate the impact of...
The CRESST (Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers) experiment explores with high sensitivity the parameter space of low mass DM candidates, being the pathfinder in the sub-GeV/c^2 mass range. CRESST employs different high-purity crystals and operate them at mK temperature as cryogenic calorimeters The flexibility in employing detectors made of different materials...
The Edelweiss collaboration performs light Dark Matter (DM) particles searches with germanium bolometer collecting
charge and phonon signals. Thanks to the Neganov-Trofimov-Luke effect, a RMS resolution of 0.56 electron-hole pair
was obtained on a massive (33.4g) germanium detector operated underground at the Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane.
This sensitiviy made possible a search for...
The recent results of DAMA/LIBRA–phase2 experiment deep underground at Gran Sasso are presented. The improved experimental configuration with respect to the phase1 allowed a lower software energy threshold. The DAMA/LIBRA–phase2 data confirm the evidence of a signal that meets all the requirements of the model independent Dark Matter annual modulation signature, at high C.L. The model...
DAMA/LIBRA observation of an annual modulation in the detection rate compatible with that expected for dark matter particles from the galactic halo has accumulated evidence for more than twenty years. It is the only hint about a positive identification of the dark matter, but it is in strong tension with the negative results of other very sensitive experiments. However, this comparison is...
The COSINUS (Cryogenic Observatory for SIgnals seen in Next-generation Underground Searches) project aims to provide a model-independent cross-check of the long-standing
DAMA/LIBRA claim on the observation of dark matter.
The use of sodium iodide (NaI) crystals, operated at cryogenic temperature as scintillating calorimeters, offers both a low energy threshold for nuclear recoils and the...
In spite of the extensive search for the detection of the dark matter (DM), experiments have so far yielded null results: they are probing lower and lower cross-section values and are touching the so-called neutrino floor. A way to possibly overcome the limitation of the neutrino floor is a directional sensitive approach: one of the most promising techniques for directional detection is...
Recent advances in development of gaseous Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) with ability to reconstruct the direction of ionisation tracks at low energy, opens the possibility of building a nuclear recoil observatory capable of detecting directional signals from WIMP dark matter and coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) events from solar neutrinos. CYGNUS aims to achieve this...
The detection of ultra-rare events as the interaction of galactic dark matter (DM) candidate particles or of neutrinos originated from the Sun requires the development of innovative detection techniques. In particular future experiments for direct DM detection requires to extend their sensitivity to masses well below 10 GeV.
The Cygno collaboration plans to build and operate at LNGS a cubic...
By virtue of their high temperatures, supernovae can produce large fluxes of MeV-scale dark matter even at couplings stronger than those constrained by cooling. In this region of parameter space, the dark matter can become diffusively trapped by scatterings within the protoneutron star, ultimately escaping with semirelativistic velocity. I will show that this can lead to the formation of a...
A fraction of the dark matter in the solar neighborhood might be composed of non-galactic particles with speeds larger than the escape velocity of the Milky Way. The non-galactic dark matter flux would enhance the sensitivity of direct detection experiments, due to the larger momentum transfer to the target.
In this note, we calculate the impact of the dark matter flux from the Local Group...
Over the last decade, significant advancements in semiconductor charge detectors have enabled single-electron resolution and threshold for the first time. These low thresholds significantly enhance detector resolution to well-motivated, but unconstrained, sub-GeV dark matter models. Following an overview of these experimental techniques in silicon and germanium detectors, I will focus on one...
SuperCDMS SNOLAB is an underground cryogenic experiment currently under construction. The main objective of the experiment is a search for dark matter particles with masses < 10 GeV. Electron or nuclear recoils deposit energy in the germanium and silicon crystals which is collected via phonon and charge sensors. Two different detector designs are utilized: HV(High Voltage) and iZIP(interleaved...
WIMPs at the TeV mass region or above experience long-range force effects, such as the existence of meta-stable bound state pairs (WIMPonium). These bound states contribute to the depletion of the relic abundance and therefore allow for even larger WIMP masses to compensate for the effect. In this talk, I present new next-to-leading order (NLO) zero and finite temperature corrections for...
A strongly-coupled sector can feature a supercooled confinement transition in the early universe. When fundamental quanta of the strong sector are swept into expanding bubbles of the confined phase, the distance between them is large compared to the confinement scale. The flux linking the fundamental quanta then deforms and stretches towards the wall, producing an enhanced number of composite...
The nature and origin of dark matter are among the most compelling mysteries of contemporary science. For over three decades, physicists have been trying to detect dark matter particles via collisions on target nuclei. Noble gases, in particular Xenon, have demonstrated leading sensitivities to WIMP-type dark matter due to their excellent radiopurity, chemical inertness, self-shielding, and...
Understanding the nature of the Dark Matter is one of the biggest challenges in frontier science today. Astrophysical and cosmological observations provide strong evidence for its existence. Several proposed candidates have been put forward over time: one of the most compelling are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). The XENONnT dark matter program aims at finding direct evidence for...
The latest results from DEAP-3600 will be presented. DEAP-3600 is a single-phase liquid argon (LAr) dark matter detector operating 2 km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada. The detector consists of 3.3 tonnes of LAr in a spherical acrylic vessel viewed by an array of 255 photomultiplier tubes. DEAP-3600 has been taking data stably since November 2016. Background events that...
DarkSide run since mid 2015 a 50-kg-active-mass dual phase Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (TPC), filled with low radioactivity argon from an underground source and produced world class results for both the low mass ($M_{WIMP} <20GeV/c^2$ ) and high mass ($M_{WIMP}>100GeV/c^2$) direct detection search for dark matter.
The next stage of the DarkSide program will be a new generation...
In the usual approach to the determination of the dark matter thermal relic abundance an assumption of local thermal equilibrium is made. In this talk I will discuss how to go beyond this assumption and introduce DRAKE — a numerical precision tool that can trace not only the DM relic density, but also its velocity dispersion and full phase space distribution function. I will review the general...
Non-thermalized dark matter is a cosmologically valid alternative to the paradigm of weakly interacting massive particles. For dark matter belonging to a $Z_2$-odd sector that also contains a thermalized mediator particle, dark-matter production proceeds via both the freeze-in and super-WIMP mechanism. We highlight their interplay and study the evolution of the resulting dark-matter...
The nature of the GeV gamma-ray Galactic center excess (GCE) in the data of Fermi-LAT is still under investigation. Different techniques, such as template fitting and photon-count statistical methods, have been applied in the past few years in order to disentangle between a GCE coming from sub-threshold point sources or rather from diffuse emissions, such as the dark matter annihilation in the...
Dark Matter (DM) constitutes most of the matter in the presently accepted cosmological model for our Universe. However, despite the increased sensitivity of direct and indirect DM searches, and the latest LHC run at 13 TeV centre of mass energy, no signal from DM particles has been detected so far, leading to exclusion limits on the parameter space of DM models. Conventional indirect searches...
Neutrino telescopes perform an indirect search for dark matter (DM) through its annihilation into standard model channels yielding neutrinos, for a broad range of WIMP masses. The ANTARES telescope, anchored to the Mediterranean seabed at a depth of about 2500 m, looks for a DM signal from two promising sources with high WIMP density: the Galactic Center and the Sun. We present the latest...
The existence of dark matter (DM) has been well-established by repeated experiments probing various length scales. Even though DM is expected to make up 85% of the current matter content of the Universe, its nature remains unknown. Numerous methods have been developed to search for DM—both directly by looking for excess energy created in DM interaction with normal matter and indirectly by...
The most promising indirect search for the existence of axion dark matter uses radio telescopes to look for narrow spectral lines generated in the magnetospheres of neutron stars. Unfortunately, a large list of theoretical uncertainties has prevented this search strategy from being accepted as robust. In this talk I will present a novel end-to-end pipeline that traces individual photon...
We explore whether the axion which solves the strong CP problem can naturally be much lighter than the canonical QCD axion. The Z_N symmetry proposed by Hook, with N mirror and degenerate worlds coexisting in Nature and linked by the axion field, is considered and the associated phenomenology is studied in detail.
On a second step, we show that dark matter can be accounted for by this...
We propose a model for the QCD axion which is realized through a coupling of the Peccei-Quinn scalar field to magnetically charged fermions at high energies. We show that the axion of this model solves the strong CP problem and then integrate out heavy magnetic monopoles using the Schwinger proper time method. We find that the model discussed yields axion couplings to the Standard Model which...
The axion, a pseudoscalar particle originally introduced to solve the "strong CP problem", is a well motivated dark-matter candidate with a mass lying in a broad range from peV to few meV. Axions clustered inside our galaxy may be observed by means of detectors called Haloscopes consisting in a resonant cavity immersed in a static magnetic field that triggers the axion conversion to microwave...
The axion is a hypothetical particle arising from the Pecce-Quinn solution to the Strong CP problem, and an excellent candidate for dark matter. The Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) is an experiment that searches for axions as a dark matter with a resonant cavity under a strong superconducting magnetic field. In previous operations, ADMX achieved sensitivity to the GUT-inspired DFSZ axion...
The version II of the Any Light Particle Search (ALPS) experiment is projected to be one of the most sensitive experiments for axion-like particles. Such particles are a solution to the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as well as potential dark matter candidates. Based on theory, the axion-like particles are weakly interacting with matter, making them invisible to regular...
In the light of the recent result of the Muon g-2 experiment and the update on the test of lepton flavour universality R_K published by the LHCb collaboration, we systematically build and discuss a set of models with minimal field content that can simultaneously give: (i) a thermal Dark Matter candidate; (ii) large loop contributions to b→sℓℓ processes able to address R_K and the other B...
The Belle II experiment at the asymmetric $e^+e^-$ collider, SuperKEKB, is a substantial upgrade of the Belle/KEKB experiment. Belle II aims to record 50 ab$^{-1}$ of data over the course of the project. During the first physics runs in 2018-2020, around 100 fb$^{-1}$ of data were collected. These early data include specifically-designed low-multiplicity triggers which allow a variety of...
A new class of dark matter models introduces a dark sector with new Dirac fermions charged under an additional U(1) gauge group. The corresponding gauge boson, the dark photon $A'$, has a MeV-GeV mass and couples to the Standard Model photon (and Z) via kinetic mixing. Fermionic bound states ("darkonium" $\Upsilon_D$) could form if the dark sector coupling constant is strong enough. We present...
The LHCb detector at the LHC offers unique coverage of forward rapidities. The detector also has a flexible trigger that enables low-mass states to be recorded with high efficiency, and a precision vertex detector that enables excellent separation of primary interactions from secondary decays. This allows LHCb to make significant (and world-leading) contributions in these regions of phase...
In spite of the variety of attempts to create dark matter at accelerators, up-to-now, none of the conducted experiments has produced any evidence.
This elusiveness of dark-matter has then triggered innovative and open-minded approaches spanning a wide range of energies with high-sensitivity detectors [1].
In this scenario is inserted the Positron Annihilation into Dark Matter Experiment...
NA64 is a fixed target experiment searching for hidden sectors at the CERN SPS. The experiment looks for new particles such as dark photons, axion-like particles, new light X or Z’ bosons by colliding 100-150 GeV energy electron beams onto an active target.
We will present the latest NA64 results and conclude with the future prospects of the experiment which will resume data taking this...
We propose a new experiment to search for axions in the $30\,\mu eV$ regime using superconductive cavities in a strong magnetic field. Axions are hypothetical particles that could solve the well known strong CP problem in the standard model of particle physics. Furthermore axions could explain the dark matter content of the universe. Axions are expected to convert to photons in the presence of...
The kinematics of WIMP dark matter-nuclear scattering is drastically altered if the interaction is inelastic, i.e. dark matter is up-scattered to a heavier state with certain mass splitting. With $\mathcal{O}$(100) keV mass splitting inelastic dark matter will evade the search in most direct detection experiments, where the momentum transfer is limited either by the mass of target nuclei, or...
Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) are thought to be produced along with baryonic matter in a variety of astrophysical processes. Core-collapse supernovae (SNe) have been identified as a promising target to probe the existence of these hypothetical particles, which could make up at least a fraction of the universe's dark matter content.
The cumulative signal from all past SNe events would...
Fragmentation of the axion field may produce the observed DM abundance, which makes it possible for ALP DM to appear with lower values of the axion decay constant than those allowed by the conventional misalignment mechanism. Previously, kinetic misalignment has been proposed to open up this parameter space. We find that for a large range of parameters the field becomes fragmented before...
We study the connection between the two indications of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM): the masses and mixing of neutrinos and the existence of dark matter (DM). To have a more testable connection, we consider a minimal type Ib seesaw model instead of the traditional type I seesaw model. In the minimal type Ib seesaw model, the effective neutrino mass operator involves two different...
We fit galactic rotation curves obtained by SPARC from dark matter haloes that are not spherically symmetric, but allowed to become prolate or oblate with a higher-multipole density distribution. This is motivated by observing that the flattening of v(r)=constant is the natural Kepler law due to a filamentary rather than a spherical source, so that elongating the distribution could bring about...
A particularly salient aspect of particle dark matter models is the connection between thermal interactions and cosmological abundance. Extending from the famous WIMP paradigm is a rich sector of dark sector models with different number changing mechanisms, all of which realize a relic abundance via interactions with the Standard Model or itself. In this talk I will introduce one of these...
Despite no experimental confirmation of the Migdal effect in nuclear scattering , it is currently being exploited by several underground direct dark matter experiments to extend limits on WIMPs cross-sections to lower masses. The Migdal in Galactic Dark Matter Exploration (MIGDAL) experiment aims to make the first observation of this process induced by fast neutrons scattering from intensive...
The NEWS-G collaboration is searching for light dark matter candidates using a novel detector concept, the spherical proportional counter. Access to the mass range from 0.05 to 10 GeV is enabled by the combination of low energy threshold, light gaseous targets (H, He, Ne), and highly radio-pure detector construction. Initial NEWS-G results obtained with SEDINE, a 60 cm in diameter spherical...
The International Linear Collider (ILC) offers a number of unique opportunities for searches for dark matter and dark sector particles. The collider program will offer important capabilities, but also, the ILC will enable new fixed-target experiments using the high-energy electron and positron beams, both beam dump experiments and dedicated experiments using single beams. This talk will...
Dark matter is one of the remaining puzzles of the Standard Model. This poster presents preliminary results of a search for dark matter candidates in invisible Higgs boson decays with the ATLAS experiment using 139 fb-1 of proton-proton collision data. The search targets vector boson fusion Higgs boson production, which is expected to be the most sensitive channel. This presentation highlights...
We explore the parameter space of a U(1) extension of the standard model $-$ also called the super-weak model [1] $-$ from the point of view of explaining the observed dark matter energy density in the Universe. The new particle spectrum contains a complex scalar singlet and three right-handed neutrinos, among which the lightest one is the dark matter candidate. We explore both freeze-in and...
We present the latest results on the development of the Dark-PMT, a novel light Dark Matter (DM) detector. The detector is designed to be sensitive to DM particles with mass between 1 MeV and 1 GeV. The detection scheme is based on DM-electron scattering inside a target made of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes. Vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes have vanishing density in the direction of...
At the Institute for Nuclear Physics in Mainz the new electron accelerator MESA will go into operation within the next years. In the extracted beam operation (150 MeV, 150 $\mu$A) the P2 experiment will measure the weak mixing angle in electron-proton scattering in 10,000 hours operation time. Therefore, the high-power beam dump of this experiment is ideally suited for a parasitic dark sector...
