Speaker: Alan Robinson
The search for dark matter has spurred the development of novel calorimeters that are now capable of detecting single electrons ionized in a large crystal. Their use in rare-event searches provides a new frontier of sensitivity not only to rare-events from novel physics, but also to those from known physics at the single-quantum level. Commonly sought signals from dark matter and neutrino scattering and backgrounds from photon and neutron scattering will appear unfamiliar in comparison to what we observe higher energies.
I will present efforts at the University of Montreal to explore this low-energy frontier through calibration and phenomenology. We are exploring the effects of collective resonances and rare processes while simultaneously developing measurements for these effects. To name a few of these processes, we are looking at low-energy Compton scattering, Thomson scattering, the Migdal effect, beam-velocity- dependent detector ionization, plasmon resonances, and energy shifts due to electron dynamics in detector materials.