Thursday, February 22, 2024, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
Björn Penning, University of Zürich
Abstract:
The nature of dark matter (DM) is one of the most important
questions in modern physics. In this presentation, we will review the status
of DM searches and present the status of two complementary experiments with
the capability to provide the most powerful experimental sensitivity for
particle DM today and in the next few years, LZ and Tesseract:
The LUX-Zeplin (LZ) experiment is the most sensitive dark matter search
experiment to date, located 1.6 km underground at the Sanford Underground
Research Facility. LZ used a two-phase time projection chamber, containing
10 tonnes of liquid xenon to search for WIMPs. LZ has been designed to
explore much of the parameter space available for WIMP models.
Tesseract is a novel sub-GeV dark matter experiment employing different
cryogenic targets to explore this novel energy region. The multi-target
approach allows to discriminate and distinguish novel backgrounds and the
exploitation of a range of possible DM signatures. We will present the
status of the experiment, detector settings, timescale, and projected
sensitivity.