ALETHEIA: Hunting for Low-mass Dark Matter with Liquid Helium TPCs

TL;DR

The paper presents ALETHEIA, a liquid helium TPC experiment designed to detect low-mass WIMPs, detailing its physics motivation, detector design, research plan, and recent progress since 2020.

Contribution

It introduces a novel liquid helium TPC approach for low-mass WIMP detection and shares recent advancements in its development.

Findings

Design of a liquid helium TPC for low-mass WIMP detection

Progress in detector R&D since 2020

Potential sensitivity to low-mass dark matter particles

Abstract

Dark Matter (DM) is one of the most critical questions to be understood and answered in fundamental physics today. Observations with varied astronomical and cosmological technologies strongly indicated that DM exists in the Universe, the Milky Way, and the Solar System. Nevertheless, understanding DM under the language of elementary physics is still in progress. DM direct detection tests the interactive cross-section between galactic DM particles and an underground detector's nucleons. Although Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs) are the most discussed DM candidates, the null-WIMPs conclusion has been consistently addressed by the most convincing experiments in the field. Relatively, the low-mass WIMPs region ($\sim$ 10 MeV/c$^2$ - 10 GeV/c$^2$) has not been fully exploited compared to high-mass WIMPs ($\sim$ 10 GeV/c$^2$ - 10 TeV/c$^2$). The ALETHEIA (A Liquid hElium Time projection cHambEr In dArk matter) experiment aims to hunt for low-mass WIMPs with liquid helium-filled TPCs (Time Projection Chambers). In this paper, we go through the physics motivation of the project, the detector's design, the R\&D plan, and the progress we have made since the project has been launched in the summer of 2020.