Speaker
Description
A promising approach to explore dark sectors, complementary to traditional accelerator-based searches, is the search for feebly interacting particles produced in high-energy interactions at accelerator facilities. Millicharged particles (mCPs), hypothetical particles carrying a small fractional electric charge, provide a well-motivated benchmark for such searches. Arising naturally in extensions of the Standard Model with hidden sectors and additional gauge symmetries, mCPs could be produced at accelerator facilities through several mechanisms in potentially observable numbers.
Skipper-CCD detectors, capable of measuring ionization signals with single-electron resolution and extremely low energy thresholds, enable sensitivity to the tiny energy deposits expected from these particles. Recent results from the SENSEI collaboration, as well as from the CONNIE and Atucha-II collaborations, searching for mCPs produced in the NuMI beamline and nuclear reactors, respectively, have demonstrated world-leading sensitivity to such particles.
In this talk I will present ongoing efforts to search for accelerator-produced mCPs using skipper-CCD detectors. First, I will discuss the progress of the Dark BeaTS experiment, currently being commissioned along the NuMI beamline at Fermilab and building on recent hardware developments for large skipper-CCD detectors. I will then present the first results from the first year of operations of MOSKITA, a skipper-CCD detector installed near the CMS interaction point at CERN, which collected integrated luminosities of 113.3 fb⁻¹ and 1.54 nb⁻¹ during the 2024 proton–proton and Pb–Pb collision periods, respectively. Together, these efforts provide valuable input for future accelerator-based dark sector searches using low-threshold silicon detectors.
| Main Contribution topic | Instrumentation for Dark Matter searches |
|---|---|
| Secondary contribution topic | Light Dark Matter |