Speaker
Description
The atomic Migdal effect is increasingly invoked to extend the sensitivity of direct dark matter searches to light WIMPs, in a regime where nuclear recoils produce no detectable signature but the accompanying Migdal electron emission is in principle detectable. Despite this, this elusive effect has never been measured in nuclear scattering. The Migdal In Galactic Dark mAtter expLoration (MIGDAL) experiment aims to make an observation of this process induced by fast-neutron scattering in a low-pressure gas, probing a range of nuclear recoil energies and target elements. MIGDAL will use an Optical Time Projection Chamber filled with low-pressure CF4, initially pure and later on mixed with other gases, to record high-resolution track images and timing information from scintillation and ionisation readout that will be combined to reconstruct tracks in 3D. This talk will describe the design of the experiment and present preliminary commissioning data, ahead of the first campaign of measurements with intense D-D and D-T neutron generators at the NILE facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK).
