| Seminar Date: | Tuesday, November 12, 2013 |
| Time: | 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM |
| Location: | El Dorado |
| Abstract: | Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are a class of yet to be discovered particles hypothesized to be components of the non-baryonic dark matter content of the universe. By operating cryogenic semiconductor Ge/Si detectors, the CDMS collaboration identifies WIMP nucleus scattering events as such by measuring the induced ionization and athermal phonon energies. This talk will describe the recent CDMSII-Si results from a blind analysis of 140 kg-days of exposure that presented 3 WIMP-candidate events with an expected total background of 0.7 events. I will also discuss the measured performance of the new iZIP detectors installed in the Soudan mine and taking Dark Matter search data since march 2012. Moreover, I will present the new CDMSLite result which is a modified configuration of iZIP detectors that resulted in a world leading exclusion limit on low mass WIMPs. Eventually, I will present recent works about the expected neutrino background to direct Dark Matter searches that places a lower limit on the WIMP-nucleon cross section achievable by upcoming ton-scale experiments. |
| Speaker: | Julien Billard - MIT
 I did my undergraduate and graduate studies in Grenoble in both the Grenoble Institute of Technology and the Universite Joseph Fourier. My PhD thesis was on directional detection of Dark Matter with the MIMAC detector where I have contributed to the R&D and the detection strategy of the detector. In parallel, I have also done some phenomenological studies to better anticipate the science reach of directional detection. I joined Tali's group at MIT in august 2012 to work on CDMS as part of both the analysis team and the detector R&D and testing group. In parallel, I am also involved in other low energy - rare event searches projects such as Coherent Neutrino Scattering and neutron background monitoring.
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