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The principle of using strongly scattering materials to recover efficiency in neutron detectors, via back-scattering of unconverted thermal neutrons, is discussed in general. Feasibility of the method is illustrated through Geant4-based…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are a leading candidate for dark matter and are expected to produce nuclear recoil (NR) events within liquid xenon time-projection chambers. We present a measurement of the scintillation timing…
We report on a search for nuclear recoil signals from solar $^8$B neutrinos elastically scattering off xenon nuclei in XENON1T data, lowering the energy threshold from 2.6 keV to 1.6 keV. We develop a variety of novel techniques to limit…
We study the possible indirect neutrino signal from dark matter annihilations inside the solar interior for relatively light dark matter masses in the O(10) GeV range. Due to their excellent energy reconstruction capabilities, we focus on…
Nuclear emulsion is a well-known detector type proposed also for the directional detection of dark matter. In this paper, we study one of the most important properties of direction-sensitive detectors: the preservation by nuclear recoils of…
Coherent scattering of solar, atmospheric and diffuse supernovae neutrinos creates an irreducible background for direct dark matter experiments with sensitivities to WIMP-nucleon spin-independent scattering cross-sections of…
The status and plans of a research program on the development of ultra-low-energy germanium detectors with sub-keV sensitivities are reported. We survey the scientific goals which include the observation of neutrino-nucleus coherent…
There is currently vast evidence for Dark Matter (DM) from astronomical observations. However, in spite of tremendous efforts by large experimental groups, there is no confirmed direct detection of the dark matter in our galaxy. Recent…
Dark matter with MeV scale mass is difficult to detect with standard direct search detectors. However, they can be searched for by considering the up-scattering of kinetic energies by cosmic rays. Because the dark matter density is higher…
Modeling the motion of ultracold neutrons (UCNs) is crucial for assessing their losses, accurately measuring their lifetime, and describing other experiments. In material traps, it is necessary to account not only for specular but also for…
Strongly-interacting dark matter can be accumulated in large quantities inside the Earth, and for dark matter particles in a few GeV mass range, it can exist in large quantities near the Earth's surface. We investigate the constraints…
The detection of low energy neutrinos ($<$ few tens of MeV) via coherent nuclear scattering remains a holy grail of sorts in neutrino physics. This uncontroversial mode of interaction is expected to profit from a sizeable increase in cross…
Recent developments of the nuclear emulsion technology led to the production of films with nanometric silver halide grains suitable to track low energy nuclear recoils with submicrometric length. This improvement opens the way to a…
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…
The search for a novel technology able to detect and reconstruct nuclear recoil events in the keV energy range has become more and more important as long as vast regions of high mass WIMP-like Dark Matter candidate have been excluded.…
We explore the viability of laboratory-scale mechanical resonators as detectors for ultralight scalar dark matter. The signal we investigate is an atomic strain due to modulation of the fine structure constant and the lepton mass at the…
Neutrons are a particularly dangerous background for direct WIMP dark matter searches; their nuclear recoils with the target nucleus are often indistinguishable from nuclear recoils produced by WIMP-nuclear collisions. In this study, we…
Energy calibration of superheated droplet detector is discussed in terms of the effective recoil nucleus threshold energy and the reduced superheat. This provides a universal energy calibration curve valid for different liquids used in this…
The construction of modern detectors used in high-energy physics experiments is typically guided by modeling with the Geant4 toolkit to evaluate detector performance in terms of geometrical acceptance and detection efficiency. Several…
We investigate standard and non-standard solar neutrino signals in direct dark matter detection experiments. It is well known that even without new physics, scattering of solar neutrinos on nuclei or electrons is an irreducible background…