Superfluid 3He dark matter detector

In this project, Ms. Tineke Salmon will work as a member of the QUEST-DMC team at the Department of Physics, Lancaster University. The work will be carried out in the Ultra-Low Temperature (ULT) Laboratory, working with her supervisory team and other members of the ULT group. Tineke will interact daily with members of the team, receiving daily informal training, instruction and feedback. She will take an active role in more formal group meetings on a weekly basis as well as dedicated personal supervision. Formal performance review, including discussion of future training needs and progress towards completion, will be carried out according to the program set by Lancaster University's provision for PhD students.
QUEST DMC is a four-university collaboration between Lancaster, Royal Holloway, Sussex, and Oxford using Quantum Enhanced Superfluid 3He as a Dark Matter detector, jointly funded by EPSRC and STFC. Tineke will fabricate and use superconducting nanomechanical resonators, combined with quantum amplifiers provided by project collaborators, to build a superfluid 3He bolometer at ultra-low temperatures. The testing and construction phase will take 6 months to 12 months. The final aim is to detect potential dark matter particles in the sub-GeV/c^2 mass range by recording their interactions with the superfluid. In this phase Ms. Salmon will be operating and analysing data from a major superfluid 3He experiment with several months of exposure time at ultra-low temperatures using a custom-made Lancaster nuclear demagnetisation refrigerator. The experimental work will be supported theoretically by a team of Lancaster and RHUL based people building a particle-physics simulation of the experiment. This work will simultaneously contribute towards fundamental studies of superfluid 3He, aimed at exploring the microstructure of the superfluid.