Search for Light dark matter with Spherical Proportional Counters

by Ioannis Katsioulas (Birmingham University)

Wednesday 19 Feb 2020, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/London

CR3 (RAL R61)

Compelling astrophysical evidence collected in the last 80 years suggests that cold, non-baryonic, weakly interacting Dark Matter (DM) particles make up ~85% of the mass of the Universe. In the 1980s a generic class of DM candidates, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with masses in the 10 GeV/c2 - 1 TeV/c2 range, was proposed that could explain the observed relic abundance of DM. As WIMPs remain elusive, new theoretical approaches such as the asymmetric dark model and dark sector predict DM candidates have been proposed, that require novel experimental techniques. The University of Birmingham joined this effort through NEWS-G, an experiment that aims to extend DM sensitivity to the mass range from 0.1 GeV, using a spherical proportional counter. The current results, status, and future plans of the experiment will be presented, along with a discussion of a new collaboration initiated with the Boulby Underground Laboratory.