UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy PhD Defense

Jamin Rager

“A Search for Bosonic Dark Matter with the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR”

The motivation for dark matter comes from a range of indirect, observational evidence such as gravitational lensing and galactic rotation curves. As viable parameter space for the traditionally favored WIMP model is carved away by increasingly sensitive measurements, the need arises to pursue alternative models, such as bosonic dark matter. Though its primary scientific purpose is to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, the MajoranaDemonstrator provides a good platform for probing bosonic dark matter because of its low backgrounds and the low capacitance of its p-type point contact detectors. Here, we present an updated search for bosonic dark matter with 3454.7 kg-d of exposure. We improve our previous result on pseudoscalar particles by a factor of 2.5 and on vector particles by a factor of 6, setting world-leading upper limits on the couplings for both species.