Related papers: Mechanical detection of nuclear decays
Optically-levitated dielectric objects are promising for precision force, acceleration, torque, and rotation sensing due to their extreme environmental decoupling. While many levitated opto-mechanics experiments employ spherical objects,…
We propose a new strategy to search for a particular type of dark matter via nuclear capture. If the dark matter particle carries baryon number, as motivated by a class of theoretical explanations of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the…
We describe our research programme on the use of atomic magnetometers to detect conductive objects via electromagnetic induction. The extreme sensitivity of atomic magnetometers at low frequencies, up to seven orders of magnitude higher…
The observation of neutrinoless double beta decay will have important consequences. First it will signal that lepton number is not conserved and the neutrinos are Majorana particles. Second, it represents our best hope for determining the…
The inverse $\beta$-decay reaction, $ \bar{\nu}_e p \to e^+ n$, for low-energy anti-neutrinos coming from nuclear reactors is of great current interest in connection with high-precision measurements of the neutrino mixing angle…
The usual nuclear recoil energy reconstruction employed by liquid xenon dark matter search experiments relies only on the primary scintillation photon signal. Energy reconstruction based on both the photon and electron signals yields a more…
Direct searches for low mass dark matter particles via scattering off target nuclei require detection of recoiling atoms with energies of ~1 keV or less. The amount of electronic excitation produced by such atoms is quenched relative to a…
Single-particle removal reactions are becoming an important tool for studying radioactive nuclei. The nuclei far from stability may reveal new regions of large deformation. We discuss the influence of the projectile deformation on the…
In most direct detection experiments, the free nuclear recoil description of dark matter scattering breaks down for masses $\lesssim$ 100 MeV, or when the recoil energy is comparable to a few times the typical phonon energy. For dark matter…
This paper describes a new method for momentum reconstruction of charged particles using multiple Coulomb scatterings in a nuclear emulsion detector with a layered structure of nuclear emulsion films and target materials. The method…
We propose to introduce additional control in levitated optomechanics by trapping a meta-atom, i.e. a subwavelength and high-permittivity dielectric particle supporting Mie resonances. In particular, we theoretically demonstrate that…
The nuclear $\alpha$ decay of heavy nuclei is investigated based on the nuclear energy density functional, which leads to the $\alpha$ potential inside the parent nucleus in terms of the proton and neutron density profiles of the daughter…
Directional dark matter detection attempts to measure the direction of motion of nuclei recoiling after having interacted with dark matter particles in the halo of our Galaxy. Due to Earth's motion with respect to the Galaxy, the dark…
The primary observable in dark matter direct detection is the spectrum of scattering events. We simulate multiple positive direct detection signals (on germanium, xenon, and argon targets) to explore the extent to which the underlying…
Directional detection is the dedicated strategy to demonstrate that DM-like signals measured by direct detectors are indeed produced by DM particles from the galactic halo. The experimental challenge of measuring the direction of DM-induced…
We summarize a novel approach which has been recently proposed for direct detection of low energy neutrino backgrounds such as the cosmological relic neutrinos, exploiting neutrino/antineutrino capture on nuclei that spontaneously undergo…
Underground laboratories host two kind of experiments at the frontier of our knowledge in Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology: the direct detection of the Dark Matter of the Universe and the search for the Neutrinoless Double Beta…
Various techniques are used to detect the presence of charged particles stored in electromagnetic traps, their energy, their mass, or their internal states. Detection methods can rely on the variation of the number of trapped particles…
The recoil of atoms in dense ensembles during light matter interactions is studied using quantized vibrational states for the atomic motion. The recoil resulting from the forces due to the near-field collective dipole interactions and…
We present a new technique developed for the measurement of the scintillation efficiency of nuclear recoils in solid scintillators. Using this technique we measured the quenching of the scintillation efficiency for the various recoiling…