Speaker
Description
The application of NaI and CsI scintillating crystals in dark matter searches suffers from limited sensitivity in the parameter space of WIMP searches despite their high light yield, simple detector design, availability of large-mass crystals, and interesting combination of different target nuclei. Main drawbacks are the high intrinsic background and the difficulty to lower the threshold below 1 keVee.
The ANAIS+ project aims to reduce significantly the energy threshold respect to ANAIS-112 while improving the radiopurity of the crystals and the background rejection strategy. This way, we expect to get an important increase in sensitivity, making ANAIS+ competitive in the searches for low-mass WIMPs with spin-dependent interactions, but also interesting for the study of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering.
The basis of the project relies on the replacement of the PMTs, classically used to read the scintillation light, by SiPMs operating at temperatures around 100 K. The higher quantum efficiency of these devices, combined with the increased light yield of pure crystals at low temperatures could result in a significant reduction of the energy threshold. On the other hand, changes in other optical properties, like the emission spectrum or the scintillation time, are also under study as they could be a key factor for the design and optimization of a future experiment. ANAIS+ is built as a collaboration between University of Zaragoza, LNGS and CIEMAT. Different prototypes using NaI and CsI have been tested as well as the feasibility of operating them inside a LAr tank that can be used as a thermal bath for the detector and an active 4pi veto. In this talk the status and prospects of the ANAIS+ project will be presented.
| Main Contribution topic | Direct detection |
|---|---|
| Secondary contribution topic | Instrumentation for Dark Matter |