Erlangen 2026 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 35: Searches/BSM II
T 35.9: Talk
Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 18:15–18:30, KH 02.018
Search for Dark Matter with metastable nuclear isomer 180mTa — •Jannis Ender, Björn Lehnert, and Kai Zuber — IKTP TU Dresden
Due to extremely suppressed transitions, the nuclear isomer 180mTa is stable on cosmological time scales. It is the longest lived isomer and its decay has not yet been observed with half-live limits at T1/2 > 0.29 × 1018 y over all decay channels. Recently it has been proposed to use such isomers as detectors for Dark Matter particles, in which the DM particles would deexcite the isomer by scattering with the nucleus. A measurable signal could then be obtained through the decay chain of the isomer or the exited DM particle rescattering in a conventional DM detector setup. In this talk, different methods of implementing these possibilities into DM detectors are discussed to further probe the parameter space of various DM models currently unavailable.
Keywords: dark matter massive particles; inelastic scattering; nuclear isomers; 180mTa; gamma-ray spectroscopy