A Transition Edge Sensor Operated in Coincidence with a High Sensitivity Athermal Phonon Sensor for Photon Coupled Rare Event Searches

Abstract

Experimental searches for axions or dark photons that couple to the standard model photon require photosensors with low noise, broadband sensitivity, and near zero backgrounds. Here, we introduce an experimental architecture, in which a small photon sensor, in our case a Transition Edge Sensor (TES) with a photon energy resolution ${\sigma }_{\gamma }=368.4\pm 0.4$ meV, is colocated on the same substrate as a large high sensitivity athermal phonon sensor (APS) with a phonon energy resolution ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{phonon}}=701\pm 2$ meV. We show that single 3.061 eV photons absorbed in the photon-sensing TES deposit $\sim$35\% of their energy in the electronic system of the TES, while $\sim$26\% of the photon energy leaks out of the photon-sensing TES during the downconversion process and becomes absorbed by the APS. Backgrounds, which we associate with the broadly observed ``low energy excess'' (LEE), are observed to be largely coupled to either the TES (``singles'' LEE), or phonon system, (``shared'' LEE). At high energies, these backgrounds can be efficiently discriminated from TES photon absorption events, while at low energies, their misidentification as photon events is well modeled. With significant sensitivity improvements to both the TES and APS, this coincidence technique could be used to suppress backgrounds in bosonic dark matter searches down to energies near the superconducting bandgap of the sensor.

5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (19)

• New ALPS Results on Hidden-Sector Lightweights
• Searching for WISPy Cold Dark Matter with a Dish Antenna
• New Constraints on Dark Photon Dark Matter with Superconducting Nanowire Detectors in an Optical Haloscope
• Broadband solenoidal haloscope for terahertz axion detection
• EXCESS workshop: Descriptions of rising low-energy spectra
• Sources of Low-Energy Events in Low-Threshold Dark Matter and Neutrino Detectors
• Large-format platinum silicide microwave kinetic inductance detectors for optical to near-IR astronomy
• An optical transition-edge sensor with high energy resolution
• First results from BRASS-p broadband searches for hidden photon dark matter
• Characterizing TES Power Noise for Future Single Optical-Phonon and Infrared-Photon Detectors
• Latest observations on the low energy excess in CRESST-III
• Low Energy Backgrounds and Excess Noise in a Two-Channel Low-Threshold Calorimeter
• The Superconducting Quasiparticle-Amplifying Transmon: A Qubit-Based Sensor for meV Scale Phonons and Single THz Photons
• The Any Light Particle Search experiment at DESY
• DoubleTES detectors to investigate the CRESST low energy background: results from above-ground prototypes
• Aluminum Relaxation as the Source of Excess Low Energy Events in Low Threshold Calorimeters
• Characterizing the Dark Count Rate of a Large-Format MKID Array
• Athermal Phonon Sensors in Searches for Light Dark Matter
• Performance of a phonon-mediated detector using KIDs optimized for sub-GeV dark matter

Cited by in corpus (5)

• First Limits on Light Dark Matter Interactions in a Low Threshold Two Channel Athermal Phonon Detector from the TESSERACT Collaboration
• Low Energy Backgrounds and Excess Noise in a Two-Channel Low-Threshold Calorimeter
• Low-Energy Backgrounds in Solid-State Phonon and Charge Detectors
• Spontaneous generation of athermal phonon bursts within bulk silicon causing excess noise, low energy background events and quasiparticle poisoning in superconducting sensors
• Binary Classification of Light and Dark Time Traces of a Transition Edge Sensor Using Convolutional Neural Networks