Introduction to a low-mass dark matter project, ALETHEIA: A Liquid hElium Time projection cHambEr In dArk matter

arXiv

2203.07901

Date

2022-03-15

Frontier

Cosmic Frontier (CF)

Topical groups

• CF1
• NF4
• RF3
• IF8
• UF3

Submitted by

Junhui Liao

Abstract

Although Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs) is the most discussed DM candidate, the null-WIMPs conclusion has been consistently addressed by most convincing experiments in the field. However, the low-mass WIMPs region (10 MeV/c${}^2$ - 10 GeV/c${}^2$) has not been fully exploited compared to high-mass WIMPs (10 GeV/c${}^2$ - 10 TeV/c${}^2$) experiments which implement liquid xenon or argon TPCs (Time Projection Chambers). The ALETHEIA experiment aims to hunt for low-mass WIMPs with liquid helium-filled TPCs. In this paper, we go through the physics motivation of low-mass DM, the ALETHEIA detector's design, possible analysis channels available for DM searches, and the latest progress we have made recently.