Description:

Abstract: The last few years have seen the largest underground dark matter searches rapidly approach their purported ultimate sensitivity limit known as the neutrino floor, or increasingly, "neutrino fog". An experiment reaches the neutrino fog went it becomes so large and so sensitive that the background from the coherent scattering of astrophysical neutrinos begins to masquerade as dark matter, thereby preventing any conclusive identification of a signal. The encroachment of the neutrino fog has driven an increase in interest towards a technique which has the potential to circumvent the limit entirely: directional detection. This technique aims to measure the strongly anisotropic angular distribution of the dark matter wind incident on Earth as we journey around the Milky Way galaxy. While in practice directional detectors are several years away from being at a competitive scale, there are several promising approaches under investigation. In this talk I will first overview the status of neutrino backgrounds to DM searches and put a slightly new spin on the idea of the neutrino fog. I will then describe various approaches for dealing with the neutrino fog, with a particular emphasis on directional detection.

Speaker: Ciaran O’Hare, ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Sydney

Host: Michael Schmitt

To read more on Dr. O'Hare's research: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/s154