European Underground Rare Event Calorimeter Array
The European Underground Rare Event Calorimeter Array (EURECA) is a planned
EURECA featured prominently in the ASPERA road map of Astroparticle Physics experiments in Europe.[3]
Dark matter
Dark matter is one of the significant
Cryogenic dark matter searches
Cryogenic dark matter experiments use particle detectors operating at millikelvin temperatures to search for the elastic scattering of WIMPs of an atomic nuclei. A particle interaction inside an absorber crystal will create a large number of
Dark matter experiments are located in deep underground laboratories, and use extensive shielding to reduce the background radiation levels from
EURECA
EURECA will take this cryogenic detector technology pioneered by CRESST and EDELWEISS further by building a 1 tonne absorber mass made up from a large number of cryogenic detector modules. The experiment plans to use a range of detector materials. This provides a way to show if a positive signal is due to dark matter, as the event rate is expected to scale with the
The EURECA collaboration includes the member institutions of
- Oxford University
- Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
- Max-Planck-Institut für Physik München
- Technische Universität München
- Universität Tübingen
- Universität Karlsruhe
- Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe
- JINR
- Universidad de Zaragoza
- INR Kiev
- CERN
The collaboration spokesman is Gilles Gerbier. The experiment will be built in the Modane Underground Laboratory, in the Fréjus road tunnel between France and Italy, the deepest underground laboratory in Europe.
R&D activities
EURECA researchers are currently involved in data taking and analysis for CRESST and EDELWEISS. In addition, there are various R&D activities under way associated with scaling up the detector technology to a 1-tonne scale. These include:
- Cryogenics: EURECA will require a one tonne mass to be cooled to millikelvin temperature. This will be done using large scale cryogenic technology, as used to cool gravitational wave experiments and the 27 km LHC accelerator ring.
- Scintillators: Research is being carried out to develop large radiopure absorber crystals with good scintillation properties at low temperatures.[5]
- Detector readout: EURECA will require hardware and software to read-out the signals from 1000+ detector channels.
See also
References
- ^ H. Kraus et al. (2006) 'EURECA – the European future of cryogenic dark matter searches' Journal of Physics: Conference Series 39 139-141. .
- .
- ^ Astroparticle Physics, the European Strategy Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine (ASPERA Roadmap).
- ^ Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop "Radiopure Scintillators for EURECA" (RPScint'2008) arxiv:0903.1539