Abstract
We present ultra low energy results taken with the novel Spherical Proportional Counter. The energy threshold has been pushed down to about 25 eV and single electrons are clearly collected and detected. To reach such a performance two low energy calibration systems have been successfully developed: a pulsed UV lamp extracting photoelectrons from the inner surface of the detector and various radioactive sources allowing low energy peaks through fluorescence processes. The bench mark result is the observation of a well resolved peak at 270 eV due to carbon fluorescence, which is a unique performance for such large massive detector. It opens up a new window in dark matter and low energy neutrino searches and it may allow the detection of neutrinos from a nuclear reactor or from supernova via neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering.
Highlights
The development of massive low-background, low-energy threshold detectors is a challenge in contemporary physics.The search of dark matter in the form of hypothetical Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP’s) is under intense development and relies on the detection of low energy recoils produced by the elastic interaction of WIMP’s with the nuclei of the detector [1,2,3,4]
We present ultra low energy results taken with the novel Spherical Proportional Counter
The bench mark result is the observation of a well resolved peak at 270 eV due to carbon fluorescence, which is a unique performance for such large massive detector. It opens up a new window in dark matter and low energy neutrino searches and it may allow the detection of neutrinos from a nuclear reactor or from supernova via neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering
Summary
The development of massive low-background, low-energy threshold detectors is a challenge in contemporary physics. The search of dark matter in the form of hypothetical Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP’s) is under intense development and relies on the detection of low energy (keV scale) recoils produced by the elastic interaction of WIMP’s with the nuclei of the detector [1,2,3,4]. The need to go to very low energies may become even more crucial, if the WIMP’s turn out to be very light [5], since the energy transfer to the nucleus is expected to be smaller. Because the neutrino is light, the nuclear recoil energy is extremely small and the challenge is to achieve a very low energy threshold (typically below 100 eV)
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