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Low Energy Neutrino and Mass Dark Matter Detection Using Freely Falling Atoms (2302.09874v2)

Published 20 Feb 2023 in hep-ph, astro-ph.HE, cond-mat.mes-hall, hep-ex, and physics.atom-ph

Abstract: We propose a new method to detect low-energy neutrinos and low-mass dark matter at or below the MeV scale, through their coherent scatterings from freely falling heavy atoms and the resulting kinematic shifts. We start with a simple calculation for illustration: for $107$ heavy atoms of a mass number around 100 with a small recoil energy of 1 meV, the corresponding velocities can reach $0.01, {\rm m/s}$ and produce significant kinematic shifts that can be detected. We then show that the proposed device should be able to probe vast low-energy regions of neutrinos from meV to MeV and can surpass previous limits on sub-MeV dark matter by several orders of magnitude. Such a proposal can be useful to (1) detect sub-MeV-scale dark matter: with $102$ atom guns shooting downwards, for example, CsI or lead clusters consisting of $10{7}$ atoms with a frequency around $103$ Hz, it can already be sensitive to scattering cross-sections at the level of $10{-33 (-34)}\rm{cm}{2}$ for 1 (0.1) MeV dark matter and surpass current limits. Technological challenges include high-quality atom cluster production and injections. (2) Measure coherent neutrino-nuclei scatterings at the 0.1-1 MeV region for the first time: with $104$ atom guns shooting downwards CsI clusters consisting of $10{11}$ atoms and a frequency of $10{6}$ Hz. One can expect 10 events from MeV solar neutrinos to be observed per year. Furthermore, (3) this method can be extended to probe very low-energy neutrinos down to the eV-KeV region and may be able to detect the cosmic neutrino background, although it remains challenging.

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