Speaker
Description
The CYGNUS-OZ collaboration is pursuing the development of gaseous Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) for next-generation rare-event particle physics experiments that make use of the directional measurements achievable with these detectors. Directional detectors offer a powerful handle for distinguishing a genuine signals of interest from backgrounds. The quintessential use-case of directional detection is for WIMP dark matter searches, where the angular distribution of recoils arising from signal dark matter events is readily separable from solar neutrino backgrounds. The CYGNUS Consortium is an international R&D collaboration which aims to develop directional gas TPCs for rare event searches, with CYGNUS-Oz the Australian grouping. This contribution outline the CYGNUS-Oz experimental activities and roadmap, including our existing TPC prototypes CYGNUS-1 and CYGNUS-N, and our large-scale prototype CYGNET. It will also present detector simulation and machine-learning reconstruction studies focused on improving three-dimensional track directionality, across candidate gas mixtures and readout configurations. These results demonstrate the improvements achievable with modern transformer-based machine-learning methods and discussion will be made on how this translates to improved sensitivity for dark matter searches.
| Primary Abstract Topic | Experiment: WIMPs |
|---|