Nanowire Detection of Photons from the Dark Side

In recent years, the development of fast and low-dark-count single-photon detectors for photonic quantum information applications promise a radical improvement in our capacity to search for dark matter. The advent of superconducting nanowire detectors, which have fewer than 10 dark counts per day and have demonstrated sensitivity from the mid-infrared to the ultraviolet wavelength band, provides an opportunity to search for bosonic dark matter in the neighborhood of 1 eV. These detectors are simple to fabricate and operate, and can be combined with gas cells, dielectric stacks, or combinations of these structures in cryogenic targets, optimized for dark matter absorption. Furthermore, superconducting nanowires can be used as both target and sensor for direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter.

In this talk, I’ll give an overview of the evolution of SNSPD devices, application for search of dark matter and the improvements in performance which have been achieved.