Results and Prospects for the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) Experiment

Abstract

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment, located at the Soudan underground mine, operated 30 low-temperature Ge and Si detectors for several years to search for Weakly Interacting Massive dark matter Particles (WIMPs). Due to their excellent background discrimination power and low energy threshold, our detectors have provided world-leading sensitivity for WIMP-nucleon interactions for most of the past decade over a large WIMP mass range. The final exposure of our CDMS II detectors yielded two candidate events, with an expected background of 0.9 ± 0.2 events, and this result was published in March 2010 in Science. A reanalysis of 8 Ge detectors with a lowered, 2 keV recoil energy threshold, provided increased sensitivity to interactions from WIMPs with masses below 10 GeV/c2 and excluded possible low-mass WIMP signals from the DAMA/LIBRA and CoGeNT experiments. The CDMS collaboration is moving forward with the SuperCDMS experiments at Soudan and SNOLAB with the goal of probing the zeptobarn scale and beyond over the next decade. To achieve this goal, a new generation of larger mass detectors with interleaved geometry for the phonon and ionization readout has been developed.