Dr Ioannis Manthos (University of Birmingham)
The Spherical Proportional Counter (SPC) is a novel gaseous detector concept, developed at CEA Saclay by I. Giomataris. Main advantage of the SPC is the low intrinsic electronic noise, that in addition to its large amplification allows for a very low energy threshold, down to single electron detection with excellent energy resolution.
Its unique characteristics make the SPC a competitive detector technology for rare event detection applications and is utilised by the NEWS-G experiment performing direct search for light DM candidates. The flexibility in the gas choice along with recent advancements on SPC instrumentation expands the field of applications of the SPC from neutrino physics to fast neutron spectroscopy and applications beyond fundamental Physics.
In this seminar the principles of the detector operation will be presented and results from direct light Dark Matter searches from the NEWS-G experiment with the SPC will be shown. Focus will be given on the R&D efforts that take place in the University of Birmingham and concern neutron background spectroscopy with the SPC, the enhancement of the multi-anode readout sensor and the accurate description of the detector performance by means of simulation. Finally, the efforts towards the next generation fully electroformed SPC for direct Dark Matter searches with the DarkSPHERE project will be presented.
