First measurement of Gallium Arsenide as a low-temperature calorimeter

Abstract

In this paper, we present the first measurement of a Gallium Arsenide crystal working as low-temperature calorimeter for direct Dark Matter (DM) searches within the DAREDEVIL (DARk-mattEr DEVIces for Low energy detection) project. In the quest for direct dark matter detection, innovative approaches to lower the detection thershold and explore the sub-GeV mass DM range, have gained high relevance in the last decade. This study presents the pioneering use of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) as a low-temperature calorimeter for probing the dark matter-electron interaction channel. Our experimental setup features a GaAs crystal at ultralow temperature of 15 mK, coupled with a Neutron Transmutation Doped (NTD) thermal sensor for precise energy estimation. This configuration is the first step towards the detection of single electrons scattered by dark matter particles within the GaAs crystal, to significantly improve the sensitivity to low-mass dark matter candidates.

References in corpus (20)

• Freeze-In Production of FIMP Dark Matter
• Asymmetric Dark Matter
• Direct Detection of Sub-GeV Dark Matter
• The SIMP Miracle
• Excess Electronic Recoil Events in XENON1T
• First Dark Matter Constraints from a SuperCDMS Single-Charge Sensitive Detector
• Search for New Physics in Electronic Recoil Data from XENONnT
• First germanium-based constraints on sub-MeV Dark Matter with the EDELWEISS experiment
• Detection of Light Dark Matter With Optical Phonons in Polar Materials
• Direct Detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter with Scintillating Targets
• Results of a Search for Sub-GeV Dark Matter Using 2013 LUX Data
• Directional Detection of Light Dark Matter with Polar Materials
• Search for Light Dark Matter-Electron Scatterings in the PandaX-II Experiment
• First Constraints from DAMIC-M on Sub-GeV Dark-Matter Particles Interacting with Electrons
• Direct Detection of Light Dark Matter and Solar Neutrinos via Color Center Production in Crystals
• DarkELF: A python package for dark matter scattering in dielectric targets
• A search for new physics in low-energy electron recoils from the first LZ exposure
• The front-end electronics system for the CUORE experiment
• Cryogenic Scintillation Properties of n-Type GaAs for the Direct Detection of MeV/c2 Dark Matter
• High resolution filtering and digitization system for cryogenic bolometric detectors