SuperCDMS: Search for Dark Matter (Angela Reisetter)
I work in a collaboration called SuperCDMS, which is one of the leading dark matter searches in the world. We’re hoping to discover what most of the matter making up the universe is. Dark matter is thought to be some kind of heavy particle that interacts weakly with normal matter, and we have a detector underground in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota which will be able to identify it if we run into it. The background rate at the mine is about 1 Hz, and we have a few years of data, with new data coming in from new detectors, so there is quite a bit of work to sort out the backgrounds from any potential signal (the dark matter). Most of the summer will be spent at St. Olaf doing analysis tasks we are interested in (there are many to choose from, since we have a lot of data to work with), and/or simulation studies, and/or a neutron counter project to study the backgrounds in the mine. Coding can be done in Matlab, a very simple language, or in more advanced languages (C++, perl) if the student desires.
Project description:
The CDMS experiment has operated cryogenic Ge detectors for several years in a well-shielded underground environment in Soudan, MN searching for signals from Weakly Interacting Massive dark matter Particles (WIMPs). Due to the low background and excellent background discrimination power, CDMS has provided one of the best sensitivity for WIMP-nucleon interactions in the world. New detectors with larger mass and further improved background discrimination, developed for the successor experiment SuperCDMS, have recently been deployed; WIMP search measurements are resuming now in early 2012.