The DAMIC-M Experiment: Status and First Results

Understand

The DAMIC-M (DArk Matter In CCDs at Modane) experiment employs thick, fully depleted silicon charged-coupled devices (CCDs) to search for dark matter particles with a target exposure of 1 kg-year.

• A novel skipper readout implemented in the CCDs provides single electron resolution through multiple non-destructive measurements of the individual pixel charge, pushing the detection threshold to the eV-scale.
• DAMIC-M will advance by several orders of magnitude the exploration of the dark matter particle hypothesis, in particular of candidates pertaining to the so-called "hidden sector." A prototype, the Low Background Chamber (LBC), with 20g of low background Skipper CCDs, has been recently installed at Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane and is currently taking data.
• We will report the status of the DAMIC-M experiment and first results obtained with LBC commissioning data.