학술논문
Performance of a Kinetic Inductance Phonon-Mediated Detector at the NEXUS Cryogenic Facility
Document Type
Working Paper
Author
Temples, Dylan J; Wen, Osmond; Ramanathan, Karthik; Aralis, Taylor; Chang, Yen-Yung; Golwala, Sunil; Hsu, Lauren; Bathurst, Corey; Baxter, Daniel; Bowring, Daniel; Chen, Ran; Figueroa-Feliciano, Enectali; Hollister, Matthew; James, Christopher; Kennard, Kyle; Kurinsky, Noah; Lewis, Samantha; Lukens, Patrick; Novati, Valentina; Ren, Runze; Schmidt, Benjamin
Source
Subject
Language
Abstract
Microcalorimeters that leverage microwave kinetic inductance detectors to read out phonon signals in the particle-absorbing target, referred to as kinetic inductance phonon-mediated (KIPM) detectors, offer an attractive detector architecture to probe dark matter (DM) down to the fermionic thermal relic mass limit. A prototype KIPM detector featuring a single aluminum resonator patterned onto a 1-gram silicon substrate was operated in the NEXUS low-background facility at Fermilab for characterization and evaluation of this detector architecture's efficacy for a dark matter search. An energy calibration was performed by exposing the bare substrate to a pulsed source of 470 nm photons, resulting in a baseline resolution on the energy absorbed by the phonon sensor of $2.1\pm0.2$ eV, a factor of two better than the current state-of-the-art, enabled by millisecond-scale quasiparticle lifetimes. However, due to the sub-percent phonon collection efficiency, the resolution on energy deposited in the substrate is limited to $\sigma_E=318 \pm 28$ eV. We further model the signal pulse shape as a function of device temperature to extract quasiparticle lifetimes, as well as the observed noise spectra, both of which impact the baseline resolution of the sensor.