New techniques to search for light dark matter

By Professor Nicole Bell, Dr Peter Cox, Associate Professor Matthew Dolan, Dr Jayden Newstead and Alexander Ritter, University of Melbourne

A major challenge in the hunt for dark matter is that we don’t know the mass of the dark matter particles that we are trying to detect. Most experiments are sensitive to dark matter that is roughly 10-1000 times heavier than a hydrogen atom. But it’s possible that dark matter could turn out to be much lighter, which makes detecting it even more challenging.

Our team of theoretical physicists has been exploring several ideas to overcome this problem, using the detection of electrons from the ‘Migdal effect’, or the detection of fast-moving ‘cosmic ray dark matter’.

Read about the challenge of detecting light dark matter here: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/dark-matter-might-be-light

Our new work on the Migdal effect in a Hydrogen-doped liquid Xenon detector has been published in a Physical Review D letter here: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.L091902