Negative ion drift is an attractive option for minimising diffusion in large micropatterned gaseous Time Projection Chambers. The use of select electronegative gases to create negative ions introduces technical challenges, most notably, a reduction in gain when compared to conventional gas mixtures. In this talk, I will report on measurements that demonstrate negative ion generation via...
Optical time projection chambers (OTPCs) with GEM amplification are well suited for applications requiring fine spatial granularity for particle track reconstruction. OTPCs reconstruct tracks by measuring the scintillation light produced in the electron avalanche. When simulating tracks in an OTPC, it is often implicitly assumed that scintillation light serves as an accurate proxy of the...
Negative Ion Drift (NID) offers a powerful solution to the intrinsic diffusion limitations of large gaseous Time Projection Chambers, enabling near-thermal diffusion without the need for magnetic fields and providing additional timing information through multi-species ion transport, which allows precise fiducialization along the drift direction. We will report the first optical observation of...
Low pressure gaseous Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) are seen as a viable technology for directional dark matter searches. Recent success with novel Multi-Mesh Thick Gaseous Electron Multiplier MMThGEM structures in challenging gases like SF6, and mixtures thereof, have prompted further investigation into micro-mesh structures for charge amplification. Modern lithography techniques used to...
Low pressure gas TPCs operating with negative ion drift (NID) provide numerous advantages required for low energy rare searches requiring directionality. Near-thermal diffusion and slow drift velocities enable the excellent spatial resolution required to resolve low energy particle tracks in 3D. The NID components most commonly studied are CS2 and SF6, which can be added to other target gases...
Particle detectors with sensitivity to the directions of low‑energy nuclear recoils open access to previously unprobed physics. Directional detection of coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering (CEvNS) would enable searches for potential beyond‑the‑Standard‑Model (BSM) effects in this interaction and provide a critical capability for exploring regions of dark‑matter parameter space...
Optical-readout TPCs produce megapixel-scale images whose rich topological information is essential for rare-event searches, yet their size makes real-time data selection increasingly challenging as detectors grow in resolution and throughput. This contribution presents an exploratory baseline study of an unsupervised, reconstruction-based anomaly-detection strategy designed to address this...
The contribution presents the design and commissioning of a new Data Acquisition (DAQ) system for the CYGNO-04 demonstrator of the CYGNO experiment at LNGS, which aims for the directional detection of rare low energy recoils for dark matter detection and neutrino spectroscopy by means of a large gaseous TPC with optical readout. The system is tailored to such a gaseous optical TPC and...
We present an experimental study of electron-recoil angular resolution using the BEAST gaseous time projection chambers (TPCs) with pixel ASIC charge readout, which measure the three-dimensional ionization distribution of electron tracks. The goal of this work is to validate a previously developed angular-resolution model that extends the commonly used multiple-scattering formalism to...
Machine Learning methods are becoming more prevalent in physics for a variety of tasks, and some have already been demonstrated within the directional recoil detection community for reconstruction and direction prediction tasks. We will propose a modern architecture to predict direction and class of recoils in one model. Further, we will propose a generative ML model, based on a...
Q-Pix is an innovative approach for measuring directional ionization and, potentially, scintillation signals in a TPC. Originally conceived as a technology for the DUNE far detector, it may be of interest to other rare-event, large-volume tracking experiments, especially those in which low data rates and low power consumption are required. I will present the Q-Pix technical concept as well as...
