Date of Award
6-30-2016
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Art
Sub-Department
Physics
First Advisor
Richard Creswick
Abstract
The strong CP problem in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), predicts the neutron electric dipole moment to be a factor of 1010 larger than the observed upper bound [15]. Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn [58, 63] proposed an elegant solution to this problem by introducing a global U(1)PQ symmetry that is spontaneously broken at an energy scale fa. A consequence of this symmetry-breaking is that a new spin-zero neutral pseudoscalar particle, the axion, is generated which is a Nambu-Goldstone boson [70, 78]. The “invisible axion” models with fa >> fEW, typically KSVZ and DFSZ models, have been proposed and recognized to be far-reaching because of the prospect that these axions can be a candidate for dark matter in the universe [59, 1, 27, 25] and the motivation that these axions can be searched for experimentally [19, 12, 29]. Because the axion mass is inversely proportional to the energy scale fa, invisible axions are very light, very long-lived and very weakly coupled to electrons, photons, nucleons, and quarks, which makes them really difficult to detect directly. CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) [10, 7] was originally designed to search for neutrinoless double beta decay using a very low background low temperature bolometric detector. It can also be used to search for solar axions and dark matter WIMPs. In this thesis, the potential sensitivity of the CUORE detector to axions produced in the Sun through the Primakoff process and 14.4 keV solar axions emitted by the M1 nuclear transition of 57Fe and detected by the inverse coherent Primakoff process is calculated. The conversion rate is calculated using density functional theory for the electron density and realistic expectations for the background and energy resolution of CUORE. Monte Carlo calculations for 5 y×741 kg=3705 kg y of exposure are analyzed using the time correlation of individual events with the theoretical time-dependent counting rate. It is found that this exposure can lead to an expected limit on the axion-photon coupling ga < 3.83 × 10−10 GeV −1 for axion masses less than 100 eV for the Primakoff process and an expected model-independent limit on the product of the axion-photon coupling and the axion-nucleon coupling ga geff aN < 1.105 × 10−16 /GeV for axion masses less than 500 eV for the M1 nuclear transition of 57Fe, with 95% confidence level, respectively.
Rights
© 2016, Dawei Li
Recommended Citation
Li, D.(2016). Sensitivity Of The CUORE Detector To Solar Axions. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3462