Sources of Low-Energy Events in Low-Threshold Dark-Matter and Neutrino Detectors
Not Available
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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Removal of radon progeny from delicate surfaces
210 Po α-decay-driven neutron background is a concern for many rare event search experiments. It is a difficult to control background because its radiogenic component depends on the air exposure history of parts. In this study, we demonstrate that about half of the radon progeny 210 Po can be removed from copper and silicon surfaces relatively easily by wiping a copper sample with acetone-wetted tissue and a silicon detector with acetone soaked cotton balls. For a copper sample, we demonstrate that long-lived 210 Pb is removed with similar effectiveness. For copper, allocated the longest counting time, additional wiping was found to be largely ineffective. For silicon, the removal effectiveness has large uncertainties. Additional cleaning showed a small but statistically significant effect. Here, capitalizing on this trivial cleaning step will allow experiments to relax their requirements on the allowable air exposure time during construction, leading to cost and time savings.
Radioactivity↗
Involving the new generations in Fermilab endeavors
Since 1984 the Italian groups of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and Italian Universities, collaborating with the DOE laboratory of Fermilab (US) have been running a two-month summer training program for Italian university students. While in the first year the program involved only four physics students of the University of Pisa, in the following years it was extended to engineering students. This extension was very successful and the engineering students have been since then extremely well accepted by the Fermilab Technical, Accelerator, and Scientific Computing Division groups. Over the many years of its existence, this program has proven to be the most effective way to engage new students in Fermilab endeavors. Many students have extended their collaboration with Fermilab with their Master’s Thesis and PhD. Since 2004 the program has been supported in part by DOE in the frame of an exchange agreement with INFN. Over its almost 40 years of history, the program has grown in scope and size and has involved more than 550 Italian students from more than 20 Italian Universities, Several Institutes of Research, including ASI and INAF in Italy, and the ISSNAF Foundation in the US, have provided additional financial support. Since the program does not exclude appropriately selected non-Italian students, a handful of students from European and non-European Universities were also accepted over the years. Each intern is supervised by a Fermilab Mentor responsible for performing the training program. Training programs spanned from Tevatron, CMS, Muon (g-2), Mu2e, and Short Baseline Neutrino Experiments and DUNE design and experimental data analysis, development of particle detectors (silicon trackers, calorimeters, drift chambers, neutrino and dark matter detectors), design of electronic and accelerator components, development of infrastructures and software for exascale data handling, research on superconductive elements and on accelerating cavities, and theory of particle accelerators. Since 2010, within an extended program supported by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, a total of 30 students in physics, astrophysics, and engineering have been hosted for two months in the summer at US space science Research Institutes and laboratories. In 2015 the University of Pisa included these programs within its educational programs. Accordingly, Summer School students are enrolled at the University of Pisa for the duration of the internship and are identified and ensured as such. At the end of the internship, the students are required to write summary reports on their achievements. After positive evaluation by a University Examining Board, interns are acknowledged credits for their Diploma Supplement. The program was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic but restarted successfully in 2022. We believe this program can be taken as a model and easily adopted by interested institutions.
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
Light Dark Matter Search with a High-Resolution Athermal Phonon Detector Operated Above Ground
We present limits on spin-independent dark matter-nucleon interactions using a 10.6 g silicon athermal phonon detector with a baseline energy resolution of 4.92 +/- 0.01 eV. This exclusion analysis sets the most stringent dark matter-nucleon cross-section limits for masses from 87--140 MeV/c^2 , with a raw exposure of 9.9 g d acquired at an above-ground facility. This work illustrates the scientic potential of athermal phonon sensors with eV-scale energy resolution for future dark matter searches.
Alkhatib, I↗
A Flux-Tunable cavity for Dark matter detection
Developing a dark matter detector with wide mass tunability is an immensely desirable property, yet it is challenging due to maintaining strong sensitivity. Resonant cavities for dark matter detection have traditionally employed mechanical tuning, moving parts around to change electromagnetic boundary conditions. However, these cavities have proven challenging to operate in sub-Kelvin cryogenic environments due to differential thermal contraction, low heat capacities, and low thermal conductivities. Instead, we develop an electronically tunable cavity architecture by coupling a superconducting 3D microwave cavity with a DC flux tunable SQUID. With a flux delivery system engineered to maintain high coherence in the cavity, we perform a hidden-photon dark matter search below the quantum-limited threshold. A microwave photon counting technique is employed through repeated quantum non-demolition measurements using a transmon qubit. With this device, we perform a hidden-photon search and constrain the kinetic mixing angle to ${\varepsilon}< 8.2\times 10^{-15}$ in a tunable band from 5.672 GHz to 5.694 GHz. By coupling multimode tunable cavities to the transmon, wider hidden-photon searching ranges are possible.
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
Terrestrial density of strongly-coupled relics
The simplest cosmologies motivate the consideration of dark matter subcomponents that interact significantly with normal matter. Moreover, such strongly coupled relics may have evaded detection to date if upon encountering the Earth they rapidly thermalize down to terrestrial temperatures, T ⊕ ∼ 300 K ∼ 25 meV , well below the thresholds of most existing dark matter detectors. This shedding of kinetic energy implies a drastic enhancement to the local density, motivating the consideration of alternative detection techniques sensitive to a large density of slowly moving dark matter particles. In this work, we provide a rigorous semianalytic derivation of the terrestrial overdensities of strongly coupled relics, with a particular focus on millicharged particles (MCPs). We go beyond previous studies by incorporating improved estimates of the MCP-atomic scattering cross section, new contributions to the terrestrial density of sub-GeV relics that are independent of the Earth’s gravitational field, and local modifications that can arise due to the cryogenic environments of precision sensors. We also generalize our analysis in order to estimate the terrestrial density of thermalized MCPs that are produced from the collisions of high-energy cosmic rays and become bound by the Earth’s electric field. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
Probing earth-bound dark matter with nuclear reactors
Strongly-interacting dark matter can be accumulated in large quantities inside the Earth, and for dark matter particles in a few GeV mass range, it can exist in large quantities near the Earth’s surface. We investigate the constraints imposed on such dark matter properties by its upscattering by fast neutrons in nuclear reactors with subsequent scattering in nearby well-shielded dark matter detectors, schemes which are already used for searches of the coherent reactor neutrino scattering. We find that the existing experiments cover new parameter space on the spin-dependent interaction between dark matter and the nucleon. Similar experiments performed with research reactors, and lesser amount of shielding, may provide additional sensitivity to strongly-interacting dark matter.
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
Search for low-mass dark matter WIMPs with 12 ton-day exposure of DarkSide-50
Not Available
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
Deepest sensitivity to wavelike dark photon dark matter with superconducting radio frequency cavities
Wavelike, bosonic dark matter candidates like axions and dark photons can be detected using microwave cavities known as haloscopes. Traditionally, haloscopes consist of tunable copper cavities operating in the TM 010 mode, but ohmic losses have limited their performance. In contrast, superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities can achieve quality factors of ∼ 10 10 , perhaps 5 orders of magnitude better than copper cavities, leading to more sensitive dark matter detectors. In this paper, we first derive that the scan rate of a haloscope experiment is proportional to the loaded quality factor Q L , even if the cavity bandwidth is much narrower than the dark matter halo line shape. We then present a proof-of-concept search for dark photon dark matter using a nontunable ultrahigh-quality SRF cavity. We exclude dark photon dark matter with kinetic mixing strengths of χ > 1.5 × 10 − 16 for a dark photon mass of m A ′ = 5.35 μ eV , achieving the deepest exclusion to wavelike dark photons by almost an order of magnitude. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
The 3 He BF 3 Giant Barrel (HeBGB) neutron detector
(α,n) reactions play an important role in nuclear astrophysics and applications and are an important background source in neutrino and dark matter detectors. Measurements of total (α,n) cross sections employing direct neutron detection often have a considerable systematic uncertainty associated with the energy-dependent neutron detection efficiency and the unknown initial neutron energy distribution. Furthermore, the 3 He BF 3 Giant Barrel (HeBGB) neutron detector was built at the Edwards Accelerator Laboratory at Ohio University to overcome this challenge. HeBGB offers a near-constant neutron detection efficiency of (7.5 ± 1.2)% over the neutron energy range 0.01 MeV–9.00 MeV, removing a significant source of systematic uncertainty present in earlier (α,n) cross section measurements.
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
Discovering supernova-produced dark matter with directional detectors
Not Available
79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
Spin-dependent dark matter scattering in quasi-two-dimensional magnets
We study the prospects of detecting dark matter coupled to the spin of the electron, such that it may scatter and excite magnons—collective excitations of electronic spins. We show that materials exhibiting long-range magnetic order where the spins are coupled only along a plane may act as directional dark matter detectors. These quasi-two-dimensional materials possess anisotropic dispersion relations and structure functions which induce a sidereal modulation in the excitation rate. We calculate the expected signal rate for some candidate (anti)ferromagnets, demonstrating a possible route to the direct detection of spin-dependent dark matter in the keV to MeV mass range.
Dark matter direct detection↗
Measurements of DC SQUID Damping Effects on Superconducting Resonant Circuits
Here, we present experimental measurements of SQUID-induced damping effects on strongly coupled, lumped-element resonators in the 500kHz–1 MHz frequency range. While dc SQUIDs are commonly used for sensitive readout of electromagnetic signals such as in lumped-element axion dark matter searches, coupling a dc SQUID to a resonant circuit modifies the circuit's resonance frequency, quality factor, noise, and impedance. These parameters have a direct impact on the science reach of axion dark matter detectors, making it important to understand SQUID damping contributions. We describe a helium dip probe and two-stage SQUID readout scheme used to probe SQUID damping effects. Measurements from this setup inform the design and operation of both future test platforms as well as next-generation dark-matter experiments.
75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
Oscillation-independent probes of nonstandard neutrino interactions from supernovae
Extreme astrophysical environments provide unique laboratories for testing fundamental neutrino interactions. We present the first oscillation-independent astrophysical probe of nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI), using coincident neutral-current signals across diverse detectors to break degeneracies that have long limited sensitivity reach. Using self-consistent NSI supernova simulations and flavor-independent neutral-current scattering we show that anticorrelated signatures between JUNO liquid scintillator and dark matter detectors such as DARWIN/XLZD, ARGO, or RES-NOVA enable clear discrimination between NSI and flavor-conversion effects. For a Galactic supernova at Betelgeuse distance our approach enables an independent probe of neutrino-quark NSI couplings in parameter space that can reach and extend beyond current terrestrial limits. This multidetector approach enables breaking degeneracies in terrestrial searches and is broadly applicable to a wide range of upcoming experiments, establishing a new principle for testing fundamental interactions with astrophysical data.
Beatty, Angela R. [San Francisco State U.; LBL, Be↗
The BDX-MINI detector for Light Dark Matter search at JLab
This paper describes the design and performance of a compact detector, BDX-MINI, that incorporates all features of a concept that optimized the detection of light dark matter in the MeV-GeV mass range produced by electrons in a beam dump. It represents a reduced version of the future BDX experiment expected to run at JLAB. BDX-MINI was exposed to penetrating particles produced by a 2.176GeV electron beam incident on the beam dump of Hall A at Jefferson Lab. The detector consists of 30.5 kg of PbWO 4 crystals with sufficient material following the beam dump to eliminate all known particles except neutrinos. The crystals are read out using silicon photomultipliers. Completely surrounding the detector are a passive layer of tungsten and two active scintillator veto systems, which are also read out using silicon photomultipliers. The design was validated and the performance of the robust detector was shown to be stable during a six month period during which the detector was operated with minimal access.
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
Characterization of the Hamamatsu 8-inch R14688-100 PMT
Large-scale optical neutrino and dark-matter detectors rely on large-area photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) for cost-effective light detection. The new R14688-100 8-inch PMT developed by Hamamatsu provides state-of-the-art timing resolution of around 1 ns (FWHM), which can help improve vertex reconstruction and enable Cherenkov and scintillation light separation in scintillation-based detectors. This PMT also provides excellent charge resolution, allowing for precision photoelectron counting and improved energy reconstruction. The Eos experiment is the first large-scale optical detector to utilize these PMTs. Here, in this manuscript, we present a characterization of the R14688-100 single photoelectron response, such as the transit-time spreads, the dark-rates, and the afterpulsing. The single photoelectron response measurements are performed for the 206 PMTs that will be used in Eos.
47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
Measurements of the 27 Al(α,n) Thick Target Yield near Threshold
In this work, we present results from direct measurements of the 27 Al(α,n) thick-target yield from laboratory incident energies E α ≈ 3 to 5 MeV, performed with the 3 HeBF 3 Giant Barrel (HeBGB) neutron detector at the Edwards Accelerator Laboratory. Our measurements have a small energy cadence in order to address discrepancies and sparseness of thick-target-yield data sets existing for this energy region. We find general agreement with existing data sets, including yields derived from cross-section data, while resolving a discrepancy between existing thick-target-yield data sets for E α ≈ 4–5 MeV. However, for E α < 3.5 MeV, our results are substantially lower than previous thick-target-yield data and somewhat larger than yields calculated from existing cross-section data. Our data complete the energy range needed for estimates of the 27 Al(α,n) contribution to neutrino and dark matter detector backgrounds and result in increased viability of 27 Al(α,n) as a plasma diagnostic tool at fusion facilities such as the National Ignition Facility.
21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
Quantum Anomalies in Condensed Matter
Quantum materials provide a fertile ground in which to test and realize unusual phenomena such as quantum anomalies predicted by quantum field theory. There are three important symmetries that are broken when classical field theory is moved into the quantum regime, the scale anomaly, the axial (chiral) anomaly, and the parity anomaly. Several potential device applications may be realized by the discovery of quantum anomalies in condensed matter, enabled by the new physics they embody, including ultra‐sensitive dark matter detectors, far infrared optical modulators, micro‐bolometric detectors, low‐dissipation ballistic transporters, terahertz‐based qubits, terahertz polarization state controls, passive magnetic field sensors, stable topological superconductors that host Majorana fermions, and qubits topologically protected against decoherence. In this perspective article, the definition of these quantum anomalies is laid out, how little is known in the context of condensed matter, and how quantum anomalies are predicted to manifest as anomalous electronic, thermal, and magnetic behavior in experiments on topological quantum materials, including Weyl and Dirac semimetals. Furthermore, the importance that mechanical strain and defects will play in modifying signatures of quantum anomalies is discussed.
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗