Abstract
The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search low ionization threshold experiment (CDMSlite) searches for interactions between dark matter particles and germanium nuclei in cryogenic detectors. The experiment has achieved a low energy threshold with improved sensitivity to low-mass (<10 GeV/c2) dark matter particles. We present an analysis of the final CDMSlite dataset, taken with a different detector than was used for the two previous CDMSlite datasets. This analysis includes a data "salting" method to protect against bias, improved noise discrimination, background modeling, and the use of profile likelihood methods to search for a dark matter signal in the presence of backgrounds. We achieve an energy threshold of 70 eV and significantly improve the sensitivity for dark matter particles with masses between 2.5 and 10 GeV/c2 compared to previous analyses. We set an upper limit on the dark matter-nucleon scattering cross section in germanium of 5.4×10-42 cm2 at 5 GeV/c2, a factor of ∼2.5 improvement over the previous CDMSlite result.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 062001 |
| Journal | Physical Review D |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 15 2019 |
Funding
The SuperCDMS collaboration gratefully acknowledges technical assistance from the staff of the Soudan Underground Laboratory and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The iZIP detectors were fabricated in the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility, which is a member of the National Nanofabrication Infrastructure Network, sponsored and supported by the NSF. Funding and support were received from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab URA Visiting Scholar Grant No. 15-S-33, NSERC Canada, the Canada Excellence Research Chair Fund, and MultiDark (Spanish MINECO). The SuperCDMS collaboration prepared this document using the resources of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, HEP User Facility. Fermilab is managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC (FRA), acting under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated by Battelle Memorial Institute under Contract No. DE-AC05-76RL01830 for the U.S. Department of Energy. SLAC is operated under Contract No. DEAC02-76SF00515 with the U.S. Department of Energy.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Nuclear and High Energy Physics