Michal Tarka

Hi, I am a physicist with over ten years of expertise in low background experiments, exploring physics beyond the Standard Model by hunting for rare signal events. Neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments for example search for nuclear decays occurring with a half-life of more than 1e25 (10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000) years. For reference, this is about 1000 trillion times more than the age of the Universe. The search for such rare events requires extreme detector sensitivities and sets the focus on the development of background reduction techniques and detector mass. I was a member of Dark Matter– and Neutrino- experiments such as CDMS, GERDA, EXO-200 , and nEXO, focussing on detector simulations, data analysis, testing, and detector R&D. The latter includes cryogenic semiconductor detectors but also scintillators and time projection chambers.
Currently, I am working on the development of diamond detectors. Diamond detectors are known to be immune against high radiation doses and are hence used in particle accelerators. However, due to their low mass, excellent impurity, low leakage currents, and long-lived phonon modes, they are also becoming increasingly interesting for Dark Matter searches in the sub-GeV mass region with a potential to reach eV thresholds. Since the search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) didn’t reveal Dark Matter on the GeV mass scale so far, the focus will inevitably switch to explore low mass Dark Matter cross-sections in the sub-GeV range in future experiments. Diamond technology might play a significant role in this effort allowing to push detector sensitivities even further.