Dr. Priscilla Cushman

particle, and it could be a dark matter particle, or it could be a particle from trace radiation.

And what happens is that that bump creates a vibration in the crystal.

That vibration then spreads out in the crystal and begins bumping off the walls.

And every time it hits a sensor, so we have thousands of these little sensors that are called transition edge sensors, but you can think of them as very, very sensitive thermometers.

And these thermometers register this vibration hitting them multiple times.

And so you build up basically a pulse out of that over time.

And it's about microseconds long.

But the shape of that pulse is very important.

What is its rise time?

How high does it get?

How wide does it get?

All the physics of how that vibration expands and the physics of how the interaction actually took place

is then mirrored in this pulse.

So the final pulse that we get tells us what type of interaction it was, how much energy was deposited, where the incident particle actually bumped a nucleus,

And it also tells us something about whether it's a background particle or a dark matter particle.

So we start the science run in the summer.

We would like to have about six months of data under our belt and another six months to analyze it.

So we're hoping that a year, a year and a half for our first run is about what we expect.

Of course, we don't stop.

We continue.