Performance of a Kinetic Inductance Phonon-Mediated Detector at the NEXUS Cryogenic Facility

Abstract

Microcalorimeters that leverage microwave kinetic inductance detectors to read out phonon signals in the particle-absorbing target, referred to as kinetic inductance phonon-mediated (KIPM) detectors, offer an attractive detector architecture to probe dark matter (DM) down to the fermionic thermal relic mass limit. A prototype KIPM detector featuring a single aluminum resonator patterned onto a 1-gram silicon substrate was operated in the NEXUS low-background facility at Fermilab for characterization and evaluation of this detector architecture's efficacy for a dark matter search. An energy calibration was performed by exposing the bare substrate to a pulsed source of 470 nm photons, resulting in a baseline resolution on the energy absorbed by the phonon sensor of $2.1\pm 0.2$ eV, a factor of two better than the current state-of-the-art, enabled by millisecond-scale quasiparticle lifetimes. However, due to the sub-percent phonon collection efficiency, the resolution on energy deposited in the substrate is limited to ${\sigma }_E=318\pm 28$ eV. We further model the signal pulse shape as a function of device temperature to extract quasiparticle lifetimes, as well as the observed noise spectra, both of which impact the baseline resolution of the sensor.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Spontaneous generation of athermal phonon bursts within bulk silicon causing excess noise, low energy background events and quasiparticle poisoning in superconducting sensors
• First demonstration of a TES based cryogenic Li${}_2$MoO${}_4$detector for neutrinoless double beta decay search
• Probing Cosmic Neutrino Background through Parametric Fluorescence