Speaker
Description
In Coherent Elastic Neutrino–Nucleus Scattering (CEνNS), a neutrino scatters coherently off an entire nucleus via a weak neutral-current interaction, producing a low‑energy nuclear recoil, typically in the sub‑keV range for reactor antineutrinos. As such, CEνNS represents both a powerful probe for neutrino physics and an irreducible background for direct dark matter searches, where nuclear recoils at similarly low energies are expected.
The NUCLEUS experiment is designed to measure CEνNS in the full-coherence regime using reactor antineutrinos from the two cores of the Chooz-B nuclear power plant in France. The detector employs cryogenic calorimeters based on $\mathrm{CaWO_4}$ and $\mathrm{Al_2O_3}$ crystals, with a total target mass of approximately 10 grams. The crystals are equipped with Transition Edge Sensors and operated at temperatures around 10 mK, enabling nuclear-recoil energy thresholds as low as 20 eV and thereby providing sensitivity to a significant fraction of the reactor antineutrino spectrum. This detector concept closely resembles that of leading low-mass dark matter experiments, enabling NUCLEUS to address shared challenges such as background characterization, ultra-low energy thresholds, and low-energy excesses in cryogenic detectors. Following a successful commissioning campaign of the full NUCLEUS setup at the Technical University of Munich, the experiment has now been relocated to its final site at the reactor.
In this talk, I will present the current status and first updates from the upcoming technical run at the reactor site, and discuss the future prospects of the NUCLEUS experiment.
| Main Contribution topic | Instrumentation for Dark Matter searches |
|---|---|
| Secondary contribution topic | Direct detection |