The CRAB facility at the TU Wien TRIGA reactor: status and related physics program

The Crab (Calibrated nuclear Recoils for Accurate Bolometry) project aims to precisely characterize the response of cryogenic detectors to sub-keV nuclear recoils of direct interest for coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering and dark matter search experiments. The Crab method relies on the radiative capture of thermal neutrons in the target detector, resulting in a nuclear recoil with a well-defined energy. We present a new experimental setup installed at the TRIGA Mark-II reactor at Atominstitut (Vienna), providing a low intensity beam of thermal neutrons sent to the target cryogenic detector mounted inside a wet dilution refrigerator Kelvinox 100. After the presentation of all components of the setup we report the analysis of first commissioning data with CaWO $$_{4}$$ 4 detectors of the Nucleus experiment. They show stable operation of the cryostat and detectors on a week-scale. Due to an energy resolution currently limited to 20 eV we use neutron beam induced events at high energy, in the 10 to 100 keV range, to demonstrate the excellent agreement between the data and simulation and the accurate understanding of external background. Thanks to these data we also propose an updated decay scheme of the low-lying excited states of $$^{187}$$ 187 W. Finally, we present the first evidence of neutron-capture induced coincidences between BaF $$_2$$ 2 $$\gamma $$ γ -detectors installed around the dewar and the inner cryogenic detector. These promising results pave the way for an extensive physics program with various detector materials, like CaWO $$_{4}$$ 4 , Al $$_{2}$$ 2 O $$_{3}$$ 3 , Ge and Si.