Brad Welliver
(University of Florida)
WIMP Searches with the SuperCDMS Experiment
There are many lines of evidence suggesting the existence of non-baryonic dark matter in the universe. This dark matter is believed to comprise approximately 85% of the matter of the universe, and remains as yet undetected. The SuperCDMS at Soudan experiment is a direct-detection experiment and has collected 2.5 years worth of data from near-continuous operation since March 2012, with a total raw exposure of approximately 3000 kg-days. SuperCDMS at Soudan uses a 9-kg array of germanium crystal detectors, called iZIP (interleaved Z-sensitive Ionization and Phonon) detectors. These new detectors allow for 3D position reconstruction as well as event-by-event discrimination via the simultaneous measurement of ionization and athermal phonon signals, and allow for improved background discrimination over the older CDMS-II style detector technology. I will present an overview of how the iZIP detectors function, discuss the successfully completed low-mass (M < 15 GeV/c^2) dark matter search, and the current ongoing high-mass (M > 15 GeV/c^2) search which uses the full SuperCDMS dataset.