Speaker
Description
Paleo detectors have been proposed to search for new physics by counting nuclear recoil tracks in minerals deep underground. These tracks have a very low signal-to-background ratio, it is therefore particularly important to accurately model the expected signals. In the literature, an one-to-one relationship between recoil energy and track length was assumed. However, using the simulation software SRIM that simulates transports of ions in lattices, we found a single recoil energy results in a distribution of track lengths, specifically subkeV recoils have dispersions $x/E_{recoil}$ ~ $2$ nm keV$^{-1}$ . Low energy recoils, which with the one-to-one assumption would otherwise result in tracks below resolution, could in fact have measurable contributions to longer, detectable tracks. We used this improved calculation to model nuclear recoils by WIMPS and search for new physics with light mediators through neutrino-nucleus scatterings.
