Speaker
Description
The Ricochet experiment aims to detect coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus
scattering at the Institut Laue-Langevin nuclear reactor in Grenoble, France. The experiment is expected to start data-taking in 2024 with two complementary detector technologies, both employing cryogenic calorimeters. One of the two detector technologies envisaged by Ricochet has a target mass consisting of superconducting crystals.
When a neutrino interacts coherently with a nucleus in a superconducting crystal lattice, the recoil energy produces phonons and excites cooper pairs into Bogoliubov quasiparticles. The milli-electronvolt-scale bandgap of superconductors might enable a significantly lower energy threshold with respect to semiconductor-based detectors.
In this work, we demonstrate the detection of particle-induced pulses in a
superconducting calorimeter, read out using a manganese-doped aluminium transition-edge sensor. In addition, we investigate and characterise the detector response to muon, gamma and neutron interactions.
