Demonstration of the HeRALD superfluid helium detector concept

作者：Robin Anthony-Petersen, A. Biekert, C. L. Chang, Y.-Y. Chang, L. Chaplinsky, A. Dushkin, C. W. Fink, M. Garcia-Sciveres, Wei Guo, Scott Hertel, Xiao‐Hua Li, J. Lin, R. Mahapatra, W. Matava, D. N. McKinsey, D. Z. Osterman, P. K. Patel, B. Penning, H. D. Pinckney, Mark Platt, M. Pyle, Qi Yan, Mark A. Reed, G. R. C. Rischbieter, R. K. Romani, A. Serafin, B. Serfass, R. J. E. Smith, P. Sørensen, B. Suerfu, A. Suzuki, V. Velan, G. Wang, Y. Wang, S. L. Watkins, M. R. Williams, J. K. Wuko · 发表于：Physical review. D/Physical review. D. · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1103/physrevd.110.072006 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena、Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research、Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics

The SPICE/HeRALD collaboration is performing research and development to enable studies of sub-GeV dark matter models using a variety of target materials. Here we report our recent progress on instrumenting a superfluid $^{4}\mathrm{He}$ target mass with a transition-edge sensor based calorimeter to detect both atomic signals (scintillation) and $^{4}\mathrm{He}$ quasiparticle (phonon and roton) excitations. The sensitivity of HeRALD to the critical ``quantum evaporation'' signal from $^{4}\mathrm{He}$ quasiparticles requires us to block the superfluid film flow to the calorimeter. We have developed a heat-free film-blocking method employing an unoxidized Cs film, which we implemented in a prototype ``HeRALD v0.1'' detector of $\ensuremath{\sim}10\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{g}$ target mass. This article reports initial studies of the atomic and quasiparticle signal channels. A key result of this work is the measurement of the quantum evaporation channel's gain of $0.15\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.01$, which will enable $^{4}\mathrm{He}$-based dark matter experiments in the near term. With this gain the HeRALD detector reported here has an energy threshold of 145 eV at $5\ensuremath{\sigma}$, which would be sensitive to dark matter masses down to $220\text{ }\mathrm{MeV}/{\mathrm{c}}^{2}$.