Description
Author and Presenter: Ryan Linehan
Abstract: The search for low-mass dark matter and coherent neutrino scattering has placed an emphasis on developing particle detectors with energy thresholds below 1 eV. As this energy scale is below the electronic bandgap for common detector materials, low-threshold detection largely relies on the ability to sense phononic excitations in cryogenic devices, often using superconducting thin film sensor architectures. To confidently use these phonon-sensing architectures for detection, it is imperative to understand the low-energy microphysical response of both the substrate and superconductor to particle impacts. This challenge is compounded by the increasing adoption of ultra-sensitive superconducting quantum sensor architectures, whose susceptibility to on-chip en- vironmental noise motivates dedicated exploration of the microphysical systems producing this noise. In this talk, we discuss aspects of this low-energy response that are relevant to operation of superconducting quantum sensors in a detection mode, and the HEP-inspired tools being devel- oped to model and characterize them.
