Thanks to DarkWave funding, PhD candidate Paules Zakhary (AstroCeNT, NCAC) will spend a 6-month (January to mid-July) secondment at the INFN-LNS in Catania, Italy. During this time, he will participate in the commissioning and calibration phases of the Recoil Directionality (ReD) experiment.
ReD has a Time projection Chamber (TPC) equipped with silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), a custom cryogenic detector with a high single-photon resolution. In this campaign, researchers will calibrate the nuclear recoils expected from Dark Matter-Argon scattering over the energy range expected from low-mass dark matter particles (WIMPs). This calibration would enhance the sensitivity of current and planned liquid argon detectors to low-mass WIMP interactions.
The hardware experience in handling the cryogenic system and TPC that Paules will gain from the expert collaborators at the INFN-LNS will provide a smooth start in building and running setup at AstroCeNT/NCAC for the quenching fluctuations calibration measurement.
