Passive low-energy nuclear recoil detection with color centers

Understand

Crystal damage events such as tracks and point defects have been used to record and detect radiation for a long time and recently they have been proposed as a means for dark matter detection.

• Color centers can be read out optically and we propose a scheme based on selective plane illumination microscopy for sub-micron imaging of large volumes corresponding to kilogram mass detectors.
• This class of detectors would be passive and would operate at room temperature.
• We apply these concepts to the detection of reactor neutrinos using coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CEvNS).