Dark matter detection technologies employing liquid helium are under development, focusing on the low-mass window from 1 keV to 1 GeV. The motivations for a helium-based technology include
- an enhancement in the recoil energy scale due to the light atomic mass
- long-lived and observable meV-scale kinetic excitations (phonons & rotons)
- extreme radiopurity naturally due to the mK temperatures
While there is building interest in this low-mass dark matter window, and helium-based techniques specifically, our group is one of few in the world actively engaged in this technology. We are building on the pioneering work of the HERON collaboration, which studied these same superfluid-based detection techniques with the aim of low-energy neutrino detection.
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