Speaker
Description
The CRAB (Calibrated Recoil for Accurate Bolometry) experiment leverages radiative neutron capture to calibrate the response of cryogenic detectors to nuclear recoils. This method inherently provides high measurement precision in the low-energy range (100–1000 eV) of interest for CEvNS event detection. In this presentation, we describe the dedicated experimental setup installed at the TRIGA research reactor in Vienna, which integrates a dilution cryostat, a pure collimated beam of thermal neutrons, and an array of gamma-ray detectors. We report measurements obtained using an Al₂O₃ detector from the NUCLEUS collaboration and a CaWO₄ detector developed at TUM. The positions of several purely nuclear recoil peaks are determined with a statistical accuracy better than 1%. We discuss the promising prospects enabled by these results, including:
• the application of this calibration method to a broad range of detector materials and technologies,
• the precise comparison of nuclear and electronic energy scales to investigate the impact of crystal defects induced by atomic displacement cascades,
• the accurate characterization of the quenching factor in semiconductors,
• new constraints on the nuclear decay scheme of target nuclei.