Speaker
Description
The DAMIC experiment at SNOLAB uses thick, fully-depleted, scientific
grade charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to search for the interactions
between proposed dark matter particles in the galactic halo and the
ordinary silicon atoms in the detector. DAMIC CCDs operate with an
extremely low instrument noise and dark current, making them
particularly sensitive to ionization signals expected from low-mass
dark matter particles. This talk will focus on results from the 11 kg day exposure with traditional CCDs, including the strictest limits on the WIMP-nucleon scattering cross section for a silicon target for $m_\chi < 9 \ \rm GeV \ c^{-2}$ and an unexplained excess of ionization events below $200 \ \rm eV_{ee}$. Furthermore, we will discuss the recent upgrade of the SNOLAB apparatus with two ($\sim 9$ g each) skipper CCDs that allow for a sub-electron readout noise and therefore a lower detector threshold. We are actively acquiring data at SNOLAB with these upgraded CCDs to directly probe the previously observed excess.
