About NEWAGE experiment About NEWAGE experiment
NEWAGE experiment is a direction sensitive dark matter search experiment with a gaseous three-dimensional fine tracking device (Micro-TPC).
Please see the conceptual movie of the NEWAGE experiment.
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles(WIMPs) are one of the strongest candidates of galactic dark matter. WIMPs can directly be detected by the elastic scatterings off the target nucleus.
Fig. 1 shows the motion of the solar system and the WIMPs with respect to the galaxy. Relative motion of the solar-system and the WIMP can be observed as the "WIMP-wind" at the earth. WIMP-wind can be observed by detecting the tracks of the nuclei scattered off by the WIMPs (Fig. 2). Because these tracks are expected to be very short (several mm) , a fine tracking gaseous device is inevitable for the WIMP-wind detection.
Fig. 1 Motion of the solar system and the WIMPs (shown as "DM") with respect to the galaxy.
Fig. 2 Schematics of the WIMP-nucleus scattering.
Micro-TPC is a three dimensional gaseous tracking detector which has Micro Pixel Chamber (Fig. 3) as its readout. We have developed a dedicated pipe-line electronics system for the micro-TPC (schematics are shown in Fig. 4) and three-dimensional tracks of charged particles are detected.
 Fig. 3 Schematic structure of the micro pixel chamber. |
 Fig. 4 Schematics of the micro-TPC and readout electronics system. |
 Fig. 5 Photograph of the micrp-TPC assembly (NEWAGE0.3a). |
