The Ion Fluorescence Chamber (IFC): A new concept for directional dark matter and topologically imaging neutrinoless double beta decay searches

Abstract

We introduce a novel particle detection concept for large-volume, fine granularity particle detection: The Ion Fluorescence Chamber (IFC). In electronegative gases such as SF$_6$ and SeF$_6$, ionizing particles create ensembles of positive and negative ions. In the IFC, positive ions are drifted to a chemically active cathode where they react with a custom organic turn-on fluorescent monolayer encoding a long-lived 2D image. The negative ions are sensed electrically with course resolution at the anode, inducing an optical microscope to travel to and scan the corresponding cathode location for the fluorescent image. This concept builds on technologies developed for barium tagging in neutrinoless double beta decay, combining the ultra-fine imaging capabilities of an emulsion detector with the monolithic sensing of a time projection chamber. The result is a high precision imaging detector over arbitrarily large volumes without the challenges of ballooning channel count or system complexity. After outlining the concept, we discuss R\&D to be undertaken to demonstrate it, and explore application to both directional dark matter searches in SF$_6$ and searches for neutrinoless double beta decay in large $^{82}$SeF$_6$ chambers.