BSM-PM: Novel Experimental Techniques for Neutrino Physics

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Neutrino physics continues to provide a wealth of opportunities for discovery and a deeper understanding of the underpinnings of the Standard Model of particle physics. This work tackles two fundamental questions related to neutrino physics: the neutrino mass and how neutrinos coherently interact with matter. The answers to both these questions remain incomplete despite almost seventy years of the neutrino being discovered. To this day, the absolute mass scale remains experimentally unknown. A discovery of the neutrino mass scale would profoundly impact the field of nuclear physics. Likewise, how neutrinos interact coherently with matter at low momentum transfers remains unexplored and could reveal new clues about physics beyond the Standard Model. The Neutrino and Dark Matter Group at MIT strives to explore the answers to both of these questions using high-precision techniques aimed at measuring the fundamental properties of neutrinos. For measuring the neutrino mass scale, we will continue to lead the Project 8 neutrino experiment, which uses the technique of cyclotron radiation emission spectroscopy, or CRES, to measure the endpoint spectrum of tritium beta decay. Project 8 aims to construct a next-generation tritium beta decay experiment with a final neutrino mass sensitivity of 40 meV/c2, and over the next few years, will construct the next prototype experiment (Phase III) to demonstrate the scalability of the technique. For the second question, the Neutrino and Dark Matter group will spearhead the Ricochet neutrino experiment. Ricochet uses a combination of Germanium and metallic superconductors to measure coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) from neutrinos created by fission. The use of metallic superconducting bolometers for recoil detection also has a broad reach, having potential applications in nuclear reactor monitoring and direct dark matter detection. Both of these experiments (Ricochet and Project 8) utilize high-precision techniques that operate near the quantum limit of sensitivity. Therefore, a portion of this research will also be devoted to developing high-temperature traveling wave parametric amplifiers, which we plan to use for neutrino physics and other future cryogenic sensor arrays. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.