Aharonov--Bohm Effect in 3D Abelian Higgs Theory

We study a field--theoretical analogue of the Aharonov--Bohm effect in the 3D Abelian Higgs Model: the corresponding topological interaction is proportional to the linking number of the vortex and the particle world trajectories. We show that the Aharonov--Bohm effect gives rise to a nontrivial interaction of tested charged particles.Comment: LaTeX, 3 pages, 1 figure, uses epsf.sty; talk presented at LATTICE96(topology), St. Louis, US

Influence of Annealing on the Optical and Scintillation Properties of CaWO4_4 Single Crystals

We investigate the influence of oxygen annealing on the room temperature optical and scintillation properties of CaWO$_4$ single crystals that are being produced for direct Dark Matter search experiments. The applied annealing procedure reduces the absorption coefficient at the peak position of the scintillation spectrum ($\sim430$ nm) by a factor of $\sim6$ and leads to an even larger reduction of the scattering coefficient. Furthermore, the annealing has no significant influence on the \emph{intrinsic} light yield. An additional absorption occurring at $\sim400$ nm suggests the formation of O$^-$ hole centers. Light-yield measurements at room temperature where one crystal surface was mechanically roughened showed an increase of the \emph{measured} light yield by $\sim40$ and an improvement of the energy resolution at 59.5 keV by $\sim12$ for the annealed crystal. We ascribe this result to the reduction of the absorption coefficient while the surface roughening is needed to compensate for the also observed reduction of the scattering coefficient after annealing

Low-Temperature Light Detectors: Neganov-Luke Amplification and Calibration

The simultaneous measurement of phonons and scintillation light induced by incident particles in a scintillating crystal such as CaWO4 is a powerful technique for the active rejection of background induced by gamma's and beta's and even neutrons in direct Dark Matter searches. However, less than ~1% of the energy deposited in a CaWO4 crystal is detected as light. Thus, very sensitive light detectors are needed for an efficient event-by-event background discrimination. Due to the Neganov-Luke effect, the threshold of low-temperature light detectors based on semiconducting substrates can be improved significantly by drifting the photon-induced electron-hole pairs in an applied electric field. We present measurements with low-temperature light detectors based on this amplification mechanism. The Neganov-Luke effect makes it possible to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of our light detectors by a factor of ~9 corresponding to an energy threshold of ~21 eV. We also describe a method for an absolute energy calibration using a light-emitting diode.Comment: additional figure, other figures improve

Radiopurity of CaWO4 crystals for direct dark matter search with CRESST and EURECA

The direct dark matter search experiment CRESST uses scintillating CaWO4 single crystals as targets for possible WIMP scatterings. An intrinsic radioactive contami- nation of the crystals as low as possible is crucial for the sensitivity of the detectors. In the past CaWO4 crystals operated in CRESST were produced by institutes in Russia and the Ukraine. Since 2011 CaWO4 crystals have also been grown at the crystal laboratory of the Technische Universit ¨at Mu ¨nchen (TUM) to better meet the requirements of CRESST and of the future tonne-scale multi-material experiment EURECA. The radiopurity of the raw mate- rials and of first TUM-grown crystals was measured by ultra-low background ¿-spectrometry. Two TUM-grown crystals were also operated as low-temperature detectors at a test setup in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory. These measurements were used to determine the crystals’ intrinsic a-activities which were compared to those of crystals produced at other institutes. The total a-activities of TUM-grown crystals as low as 1.23 ± 0.06 mBq/kg were found to be significantly smaller than the activities of crystals grown at other institutes typically ranging between ~ 15 mBq/kg and ~ 35 mBq/kg

Cryogenic characterization of a LiAlO 2 crystal and new results on spin-dependent dark matter interactions with ordinary matter: CRESST Collaboration

In this work, a first cryogenic characterization of a scintillating LiAlO 2 single crystal is presented. The results achieved show that this material holds great potential as a target for direct dark matter search experiments. Three different detector modules obtained from one crystal grown at the Leibniz-Institut für Kristallzüchtung (IKZ) have been tested to study different properties at cryogenic temperatures. Firstly, two 2.8 g twin crystals were used to build different detector modules which were operated in an above-ground laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) in Munich, Germany. The first detector module was used to study the scintillation properties of LiAlO 2 at cryogenic temperatures. The second achieved an energy threshold of (213.02 ± 1.48) eV which allows setting a competitive limit on the spin-dependent dark matter particle-proton scattering cross section for dark matter particle masses between 350MeV/c2 and 1.50GeV/c2. Secondly, a detector module with a 373 g LiAlO 2 crystal as the main absorber was tested in an underground facility at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS): from this measurement it was possible to determine the radiopurity of the crystal and study the feasibility of using this material as a neutron flux monitor for low-background experiments. © 2020, The Author(s)

Lithium-Containing Crystals for Light Dark Matter Search Experiments

In the current direct dark matter search landscape, the leading experiments in the sub-GeV mass region mostly rely on cryogenic techniques which employ crystalline targets. One attractive type of crystals for these experiments is those containing lithium, due to the fact that 7Li is an ideal candidate to study spin-dependent dark matter interactions in the low mass region. Furthermore, 6Li can absorb neutrons, a challenging background for dark matter experiments, through a distinctive signature which allows the monitoring of the neutron flux directly on site. In this work, we show the results obtained with three different detectors based on LiAlO2, a target crystal never used before in cryogenic experiments