Recently there is a flourishing and notable interest in the crystalline scintillator material sodium iodide (NaI) as target for direct dark matter searches. This is mainly driven by the long-reigning contradicting situation in the dark matter sector: the positive evidence for the detection of a dark matter modulation signal claimed by the DAMA/LIBRA collaboration is (under so-called standard assumptions) inconsistent with the null-results reported by most of the other direct dark matter experiments. We present the results of a first prototype detector using a new experimental approach in comparison to \textit{conventional} single-channel NaI scintillation light detectors: a NaI crystal operated as a scintillating calorimeter at milli-Kelvin temperatures simultaneously providing a phonon (heat) plus scintillation light signal and particle discrimination on an event-by-event basis. We evaluate energy resolution, energy threshold and further performance parameters of this prototype detector developed within the COSINUS R&D project.
@article{arxiv.1705.11028,
title = {Results from the first cryogenic NaI detector for the COSINUS project},
author = {COSINUS Collaboration and G. Angloher and P. Carniti and L. Cassina and L. Gironi and C. Gotti and A. Gütlein and M. Maino and M. Mancuso and L. Pagnanini and G. Pessina and F. Petricca and S. Pirro and F. Pröbst and R. Puig and F. Reindl and K. Schäffner and J. Schieck and W. Seidel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.11028},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
11 pages, 7 figures, version accepted by JINST for publication