Coherent Elastic Neutrino Nucleus Scattering and Dark Matter with Spherical Proportional Counters

Objective

neutrinoSPHERE, following a multidisciplinary synergic approach, will comprehensively investigate the wider aspects of astroparticle physics. It will exploit the potential of Spherical Proportional Counters (SPC) developed by NEWS-G Collaboration and will develop novel tools based on Machine-Learning (ML) techniques to conclusively respond to long-standing puzzles in particle physics such as the nature of neutrinos and the existence of dark matter (DM). The ultra low-threshold capabilities of SPCs are ideal to explore neutrino magnetic moments through coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS), and sub-GeV boosted-DM signatures induced by: cosmic rays, Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background and solar reflection. Furthermore, neutrinoSPHERE will open new directions expanding the scientific programme and physics reach of NEWS-G to additional components of the dark sector via the dark boson portal: dark photons, dark scalars, and axion-like particles. To address these challenges, neutrinoSPHERE will develop NEWS-ML, a novel simulation framework based on ML, offering rapid and fully validated state-of-the-art simulations of CEvNS, DM and hidden sector signals in SPCs. The performance of NEWS-ML will be accelerated with GPU technology and MPI-parallelisation, facilitating statistical inference and accurate constraints extraction. neutrinoSPHERE offers the ideal template to achieve the required breakthroughs in astroparticle physics by investigating previously-unexplored regions of BSM scenarios, in which existing rare-event searches have limited sensitivity, thus complementing them. The research team has diverse expertise, ranging from instrumentation and detector R&D to beyond the Standard Model phenomenology. The scientific results will be disseminated in different target groups through journal publications, conference announcements, public talks, outreach activities and social media.