The results from our recent dark matter search with two prototype CCD modules in the Low Background Chamber at the Modane Underground Laboratory have now been published in PRL. Although we have not yet discovered dark matter particles, we exclude, for the first time and for a wide range of particle masses, the hypothesis that hidden-sector particles produced by the "freeze-in" mechanism in the early universe constitute most of the dark matter.

The following two announcements are long overdue:

Dr. Michelangelo Traina started as our new postdoc on DAMIC-M on January 3rd, 2023!

Michelangelo received his Ph.D. from Sorbonne University in Paris and has been a DAMIC(-M) collaborator for the past three years.

Welcome!

DAMIC's results on the search for low-mass weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) was posted yesterday on the arXiv! Link.

We probed with the same nuclear target, and with an order-of-magnitude improvement in energy threshold, the parameter space that corresponds to the WIMP-signal interpretation of the excess of nuclear-recoil events recorded by the CDMS silicon experiment in 2013.

We have recently demonstrated, for the first time, single-electron response with a 675 um-thick skipper CCD fabricated on high-resistivity silicon. This is the first techonolgical milestone of the DAMIC-M program.

The extremely low noise of the skipper CCD will allow us to reach unprecedentedly low energy thresholds with DAMIC-M, for an increase in sensitivity by several orders of magnitude in the search for light dark matter particles.