Directional detection of dark matter with diamond

Abstract

Searches for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter will in the near future be sensitive to solar neutrinos. Directional detection offers a method to reject solar neutrinos and improve WIMP searches, but reaching that sensitivity with existing directional detectors poses challenges. We propose a combined atomic/particle physics approach using a large-volume diamond detector. WIMP candidate events trigger a particle detector, after which spectroscopy of nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers reads out the direction of the incoming particle. We discuss the current state of technologies required to realize directional detection in diamond and present a path towards a detector with sensitivity below the neutrino floor.

High-precision mapping of diamond crystal strain using quantum interferometry

“…We then apply the interferometry protocol using a wide-field quantum diamond microscope (QDM) [2,39,40], which provides highsensitivity strain imaging of a millimeter-scale diamond section. These results provide a benchmark for sensitive mapping of diamond strain with a unique combination of spatial resolution, field-of-view, and sensitivity; and thereby open a path to new applications, including characterization and engineering of diamonds for quantum information and metrology; in situ strain measurements using micron-scale diamonds in soft materials; and a future dark matter search [31,32].…”

“…While scanned confocal microscopy allows strain mapping in three dimensions with a well-defined interrogation volume, many applications benefit from the speed and scalability of widefield imaging. For example, diamond characterization and engineering require broad surveys of millimeter-scale diamond to understand the overall growth properties [14,33]; nanofabrication analysis could benefit from measuring many devices in parallel [19]; and dark matter detection will require quickly analyzing large volumes of material to find particle impact sites [32]. We therefore implemented wide-field NV-diamond strain imaging on diamond section B (see Appendix B) using a quantum diamond microscope (QDM), schematically illustrated in Fig.…”

“…Additionally, the resilience of the strain-CPMG sequence to nuclear spin bath-induced magnetic inhomogeneity will allow sensitive strain characterization in diamonds with high nitrogen or 13 C content, which currently is limited by broad ODMR linewidths and short dephasing times. Future work towards other applications, such as photonic structure en-gineering and dark matter searches, will implement improved depth resolution in widefield imaging, e.g., using structured illumination or light-sheet microscopy [32]; and for each resulting µm 3 -scale pixel in a QDM image we expect the strain sensitivity to be similar to that measured with the confocal technique.…”

“…Small diamonds as in situ strain sensors can be widely deployed as in high-pressure diamond anvil cells or in curing amorphous solids [29,30]. Finally, sensitive measurements of damage-induced strain in diamond are essential to proposed diamond-based particle detectors, such as for directional detection of dark matter consisting of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) [31,32].…”

Directional Recoil Detection

“…For this reason, strategies to reclaim time information, or mitigate against the lack of it, become important, especially because these detectors typically have limited directionality. For instance, in the crystal defect detector (134), a prompt scintillation or phonon signal can serve as a prompt to trigger the removal of subregions in the detector bulk where the event took place. In the proposed DNA detector, this issue was not addressed (137), although one could envision a system of microfluidics acting as a conveyor belt to transport the broken strands out of the detector.…”