Related papers: Mechanical detection of nuclear decays

In direct dark matter (DM) detection via scattering off the electrons, the momentum transfer plays a crucial role. Previous work showed that for self-interacting DM, if the DM particle has a size (the so-called puffy DM), the radius effect…

We present a novel method for detecting the relic neutrino background that takes advantage of structured quantum degeneracy to amplify the drag force from neutrinos scattering off a detector. Developing this idea, we present a…

An atom recoils when it undergoes spontaneous decay. In this paper we present a microscopic calculation of the recoil of a source atom imbedded in a dielectric medium. We find that the source atom recoils with the canonical photon momentum…

The nuclear recoil effect, known also as the mass shift, is one of theoretical contributions to the energy levels in muonic atoms. Accurate theoretical predictions are therefore needed for extracting e.g. the nuclear charge radii from…

Since the discovery of nuclear beta decay, nuclear physicists have studied the weak interaction and the nature of neutrinos. Many recent and current experiments have been focused on the elucidation of neutrino oscillations and neutrino…

Exotic dark matter together with dark energy or cosmological constant seem to dominate in the Universe. An even higher density of such matter seems to be gravitationally trapped in our Galaxy. The nature of dark matter can be unveiled only,…

Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering and low-mass Dark Matter detectors rely crucially on the understanding of their response to nuclear recoils. We report the first observation of a nuclear recoil peak at around 112 eV induced by…

Many optical measurement techniques, such as light scattering from wavelength-scale particles or detecting motion from a surface with an optical lever, encode information in a complex radiation pattern. Extracting all available information…

We ask the question of how angular momentum is conserved in electroweak interaction processes. To introduce the problem with a minimum of mathematics, we first raise the same issue in elastic scattering of a circularly polarized photon by…

The known direction of motion of dark matter particles relative to the Earth may be a key for their unambiguous identification even in the presence of backgrounds. We describe a prototype detector that is able to reconstruct direction…

Atomic nuclei are quantum many-body systems of protons and neutrons held together by strong nuclear forces. Under the proper conditions, nuclei can break into two (sometimes three) fragments which will subsequently decay by emitting…

Signal reception of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) usually relies on electrical amplification of the electromotive force caused by nuclear induction. Here, we report up-conversion of a radio-frequency NMR signal to an optical regime using…

The viability of using a Bubble Chamber for rare event searches and in particular for the detection of dark matter particle candidates is considered. Techniques leading to the deactivation of inhomogeneous nucleation centers and subsequent…

The neutrino produced in the pion decay reveals a new diffraction phenomenon due to many-body interactions in an intermediate time region when wave functions of the parent and daughters overlap. Because of diffraction, the probability to…

Quantum measurements of mechanical systems can produce optical squeezing via ponderomotive forces. Its observation requires high environmental isolation and efficient detection, typically achieved by using optical cavities and cryogenic…

We have developed a detector, consisting of a cryogenic calorimeter with a scintillating crystal as absorber, and a second calorimeter for the detection of the scintillation light, both operated at 12 mK. Using a CaWO4 crystal with a mass…

Neutrinoless double beta decay, which is a very old and yet elusive process, is reviewed. Its observation will signal that lepton number is not conserved and the neutrinos are Majorana particles. More importantly it is our best hope for…

Of the many extensions to the standard model that could possibly generate neutrino mass, most necessitate the neutrino being a Majorana fermion. If this is the case, the rare process of neutrinoless double beta decay is predicted with half…

A convincing identification of dark matter (DM) particles can probably be achieved only through a combined analysis of different detections strategies, which provides an effective way of removing degeneracies in the parameter space of DM…

We report a measurement of the ionization efficiency of silicon nuclei recoiling with sub-keV kinetic energy in the bulk silicon of a charge-coupled device (CCD). Nuclear recoils are produced by low-energy neutrons ($<$24 keV) from a…