Article by UMD quantum researchers featured on cover of AVS Quantum Science

The cover of the December 2022 issue of AVS Quantum Science features an article by UMD quantum researchers. Physics Ph.D. student Reza Ebadi is the first author on the article, entitled “Directional detection of dark matter using solid-state quantum sensing”.

The result is part of a collaboration led by Professor Ronald Walsworth, Director of the UMD Quantum Technology Center (QTC), and includes researchers from multiple institutions, including MIT, NIST, Argonne National Lab, Sandia National Labs, Johns Hopkins University, Boston University, and Harvard.

The article discusses the detector principle and the status of experimental techniques required for directional readouts of nuclear recoil tracks. Next-generation dark matter (DM) detectors searching for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are sensitive to coherent scattering from solar neutrinos, requiring an efficient background signal discrimination tool, a directional detector. These detectors improve sensitivity to WIMP DM despite the irreducible neutrino background.

The research conducted for this project focuses on using diamond as a target material. The use of diamond is a popular conductor for emerging quantum technologies and a component of next-generation semiconductor electronics.

The full article can be found on the AVS Quantum Science website.

Published January 4, 2023