| Abstract: |
An ongoing challenge in dark matter direct detection is improving the sensitivity to low-mass dark matter. One approach is to leverage the Migdal effect, that is ionisation accompanying a nuclear recoil. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss a new theoretical calculation of the Migdal effect, motivated by ongoing efforts to calibrate the Migdal effect using neutron sources. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss a new proposal for the detection of keV-scale dark matter using superfluid optomechanics. Optomechanical systems can convert otherwise undetectable ueV-scale phonons produced by scattering dark matter into detectable eV-scale photons. The Optomechanical Dark-matter INstrument (ODIN) is a proposed new detector based on this idea that will be sensitive to dark matter in the 1-100 keV mass range. |
