Samuel Henry

Abstract:

EURECA (European Underground Rare Event Calorimeter Array) is an astro-particle physics facility aiming to directly detect galactic dark matter. The Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane has been selected as host laboratory. The EURECA collaboration unites CRESST, EDELWEISS and the Spanish-French experiment ROSEBUD, thus concentrating and focussing effort on cryogenic detector research in Europe into a single facility. EURECA will use a target mass of up to one ton, enough to explore WIMP - nucleon scalar scattering cross sections in the region of 10-9 - 10-10 picobarn. A major advantage of EURECA is the planned use of more than just one target material (multi target experiment for WIMP identification). © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.

Abstract:

Scintillation properties of PbWO4 and PbMoO4 have been studied as potential cryogenic scintillators for rare event searches. The light output and decay kinetics of PbWO4 and PbMoO4 crystals for excitation with 241Am α particles were examined over the temperature range 7300 K. The α/γ ratio was measured with a PbMoO4 crystal scintillator for 5.3 MeV α particles, and the ability to distinguish between signals induced by α particles and γ quanta by pulse shape discrimination was assessed for the PbMoO4 crystal scintillator at 77 K. The energy dependence of the quenching factor for oxygen, molybdenum, tungsten and lead ions at low energy was calculated using a semi-empirical approach with data from the α particle measurements. The study demonstrates the good potential of these scintillators for cryogenic dark matter search and double beta decay experiments. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.