Speaker
Description
The CRAB (Calibrated Recoils for Accurate Bolometry) experiment uses radiative neutron capture to calibrate the response of cryogenic detectors to low-energy nuclear recoils (100 – 1000 eV) with high precision, providing a key characterization for the interpretation of Coherent Elastic Neutrino/Nucleus Scattering measurements and Dark Matter searches.
In this presentation, I will present the experimental setup located at the TRIGA-Mark II research reactor in Vienna, Austria, combining a dilution cryostat exposed to a pure collimated beam of thermal neutrons with an array of gamma-ray detectors. I will also report measurements obtained with an Al2O3 detector from the NUCLEUS collaboration and a CaWO4 detector developed at the Technical University of Munich, revealing several nuclear recoil peaks in the (100 – 1000 eV) range whose energies are determined with a sub-percent statistical accuracy.
To better understand the detector response and to be able to translate this nuclear calibration to other experimental sites, I will finally discuss ongoing developments to perform a direct inter-calibration with electronic recoils. This new setup will include LED bursts and low-energy X-rays. This inter-comparison would shed new light on solid-state physics.