The measurement of coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering for sterile neutrino and non-standard model neutrino interaction searches, as well as searches for many exotic dark matter candidates share a single unsolved technical difficulty: the need to measure very small excitations (1-100eV nuclear recoils or single e-/h+) in massive detectors.

The use of athermal phonon detector technology to solve this problem seems natural since athermal phonons can be collected and concentrated into very small sensor volumes unlike thermal phonons and thus energy resolution and trigger threshold do not directly scale with the target mass. Secondly, by operating with a high voltage bias, one can convert electrostatic potential energy into Luke-Neganov phonons and thus significantly gain the athermal phonon signal.

In this talk, we'll discuss the reasons why the current CDMS detectors do not meet the necessary requirements and we’ll propose a threshold optimized design which could potentially achieve 1-10eV phonon trigger thresholds or equivalently single e-/h+ sensitivity.