24 research outputs found
Improvements in the determination of ISS Ca II K parameters
Measurements of the ionized Ca II K line are one of the major resources for
long-term studies of solar and stellar activity. They also play a critical role
in many studies related to solar irradiance variability, particularly as a
ground-based proxy to model the solar ultraviolet flux variation that may
influence the Earth's climate. Full disk images of the Sun in Ca II K have been
available from various observatories for more than 100 years and latter
synoptic Sun-as-a-star observations in Ca II K began in the early 1970s. One of
these instruments, the Integrated Sunlight Spectrometer (ISS) has been in
operation at Kitt Peak (Arizona) since late 2006. The ISS takes daily
observations of solar spectra in nine spectra bands, including the Ca II K and
H line s. We describe recent improvements in data reduction of Ca II K
observations, and present time variations of nine parameters derived from the
profile of this spectral line
Sensitivity projections for a dual-phase argon TPC optimized for light dark matter searches through the ionization channel
Dark matter lighter than 10  GeV/c2 encompasses a promising range of candidates. A conceptual design for a new detector, DarkSide-LowMass, is presented, based on the DarkSide-50 detector and progress toward DarkSide-20k, optimized for a low-threshold electron-counting measurement. Sensitivity to light dark matter is explored for various potential energy thresholds and background rates. These studies show that DarkSide-LowMass can achieve sensitivity to light dark matter down to the solar neutrino fog for GeV-scale masses and significant sensitivity down to 10  MeV/c2 considering the Migdal effect or interactions with electrons. Requirements for optimizing the detector’s sensitivity are explored, as are potential sensitivity gains from modeling and mitigating spurious electron backgrounds that may dominate the signal at the lowest energies