Speaker
Description
CaWO4 is a well-known target material for experiments searching for rare events like coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering with NUCLEUS or hypothetical dark matter-nucleus scattering with CRESST. Pushing the detection threshold down to sub-keV energies, experiments encounter new phenomena like an exponential rise of observed events towards lowest energies of yet unknown origin. This highlights the need for verified and reliable simulations of radioactive background components at sub-keV energies, e.g. based on the widely used Geant4 toolkit.
The ELOISE project aims to tackle this issue for electromagnetic particle interactions in CaWO4 in a two-stage approach: First by a systematic evaluation of the current accuracy by comparing benchmark simulations with data from extended literature research and dedicated measurements. Second, if needed, ELOISE intend to develop bespoken simulation code for CaWO4 to improve the accuracy at the sub-keV energy regime. During a four-year time scale, ELOISE plans to study the accuracy of ionization, photoelectric effect, atomic de-excitation and nuclear stopping. Currently, ELOISE conduct a dedicated measurement of electronic energy loss in CaWO4 via ionization.
In this contribution, we will first motivate the problem and outline the scope of ELOISE. Afterwards, we will report first results of ELOISE’s reference measurements. Finally, we will discuss our preliminary findings and its implication for rare event searches with CaWO4.
