Collaborative Research: The SuperCDMS at SNOLAB Science Program

The goal of the SuperCDMS Collaboration is to directly detect galactic dark matter and in so doing address the following questions: what is the particle nature of dark matter, what are its astrophysical properties, and how does it relate to the Standard Model? In pursuit of this goal, the Collaboration is nearing completion on the construction of a new experiment, SuperCDMS SNOLAB, sited in SNOLAB, Sudbury, Canada. The advanced cryogenic detectors being used by the experiment have unprecedented sensitivity to nuclear recoil interactions from dark matter with mass in the 400 MeV/c^2 to 6 GeV/c^2 range (the mass range from approximately an individual proton to a few protons), as well as inelastic electronic interactions in the 1 MeV/c^2 to 1 GeV/c^2 range (the mass range approximately between an electron and a proton.). The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment will have sensitivity to dark matter interactions down to a cross section where solar neutrino interactions with the detector become a limiting background (the so-called “neutrino fog”). The SuperCDMS collaboration, and the university groups supported by this award, will complete the installation of experiment during the first award year, and will subsequently transition to commissioning and data acquisition. As part of commissioning, it is our goal to establish stable, optimal detector operation and understand the detector response, including backgrounds. The tasks supported under this award will be scientific or involve those being scientifically trained. Those tasks are essential to producing timely results from the first run of the full payload. The work supported by this award will focus on: Completion and deployment of a robust, efficient, and fast data quality monitoring and data handling chain, providing personnel to support the installation and commissioning efforts of the SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, and producing a comprehensive detector response model including a plan to fully calibrate the SuperCDMS SNOLAB detectors. Finally, the supported work will include analysis of science data taken in the CUTE facility with a HV detector tower to produce competitive dark matter searches, as well as analysis of Run 1 data from the full SuperCDMS SNOLAB payload.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.