Improving the Sensitivity of Photon and Athermal Phonon Sensors to Search for Dark Matter throughout the Mass Range from 50meV through 500MeV

Substantial astronomical observations have established that approximately 25% of the energy density of the universe is composed of cold non-baryonic dark matter, whose detection and characterization could be key to improving our understanding of the laws of physics. Over the past three decades, physicists have largely focused on searching for dark matter within the 10 GeV-1 TeV range (WIMPs), unfortunately without success. These failures motivated a successful theoretical effort to develop well motivated dark matter models throughout a much larger mass range, and now we need to develop the necessary experimental detector technology that is necessary to search for these light mass dark matter candidates. In this talk, we’ll discuss the experimental requirements when searching for dark matter throughout the mass range from 50meV- 500 MeV. We’ll also discuss recent R&D breakthroughs in photon sensor and athermal phonon sensor technology that will enable experiments that are being proposed using silicon, polar crystals, superfluid He, and periodic photonic materials as the detector material.