Light Sheet Quantum Diamond Microscopy for Dark Matter Detection

Conventional detectors for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter will soon reach sensitivities where signals may be masked by a solar neutrino background. Diamond-based detectors equipped with quantum sensors offer a novel solution to this challenge by utilizing directional information to differentiate between neutrinos and WIMPs. In this approach, incident particles create damage tracks in the diamond lattice, which can be reconstructed from spectroscopy of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers near the tracks. A critical stage in this scheme is the rapid localization of tracks with micron precision in order to proceed to nanoscale imaging without falling behind the expected detector event rate. Towards this goal, we present progress on a light-sheet quantum diamond microscope (LS-QDM), which aims to measure crystal lattice strain in a millimeter-scale diamond chip with a ∼ 100 x 100 μm² field of view and a ∼ 1 μm lateral and axial resolution. These abilities will enable high-throughput, fully three-dimensional strain mapping of diamond, surpassing limitations of conventional QDMs that rely on 2D widefield imaging or confocal microscopy.