Demonstration of the HeRALD superfluid helium detector concept
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- University of California Berkeley; University of Massachusetts Amherst
- University of California Berkeley
- Argonne National Laboratory
- University of Massachusetts
- University of Michigan
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)
- Florida State University; National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- University of California Berkeley; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Texas A&M University
- High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)
The SPICE/HeRALD collaboration is performing research and development to enable studies of sub-GeV dark matter models using a variety of target materials. Here we report our recent progress on instrumenting a superfluid 4He target mass with a transition-edge sensor based calorimeter to detect both atomic signals (scintillation) and 4He quasiparticle (phonon and roton) excitations. The sensitivity of HeRALD to the critical “quantum evaporation” signal from 4He quasiparticles requires us to block the superfluid film flow to the calorimeter. We have developed a heat-free film-blocking method employing an unoxidized Cs film, which we implemented in a prototype “HeRALD v0.1” detector of ~10 g target mass. This article reports initial studies of the atomic and quasiparticle signal channels. Here, a key result of this work is the measurement of the quantum evaporation channel’s gain of 0.15±0.01, which will enable 4He-based dark matter experiments in the near term. With this gain the HeRALD detector reported here has an energy threshold of 145 eV at 5σ, which would be sensitive to dark matter masses down to 220 MeV/c2.
- Research Organization:
- University of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
- Contributing Organization:
- SPICE/HeRALD Collaboration
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231; AC02-06CH11357; NA0000979; NA0003180; SC0019319; SC0020374; SC0022354
- OSTI ID:
- 2467333
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D., Journal Name: Physical Review. D. Journal Issue: 7 Vol. 110; ISSN 2470-0010
- Publisher:
- American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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