Direct dark matter observation efforts generally use extremely sensitive detectors, coupled to vast amounts of material, at very low temperatures, and operated for several years. The mineral detection approach is a promising alternative using existing crystalline mineral deposits that have been exposed for millions or even billions of years. Nuclear recoils due to interactions with dark matter (and other particles), can form optically active crystalline defects that can readily be observed. Our group performs ab initio simulations to understand the optical properties and formation energies of defects in various minerals in order to understand how to reconstruct the spectrum of incident particles [1][2]. This work is supported by the NSF Growing Convergence Research award 2428507.

Detection of sub-eV neutrinos with coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CEvNS) in kilogram-scale targets can enable a broad range of nuclear security applications. However, all existing CEvNS detectors that have pushed below 1000 eV detection thresholds have seen an exponential increase in noise rate, regardless of detector material or sensing method. We are using first principles calculations to explore defect formation/relaxation contributions to this noise, either through energy loss through formation events or spurious events due to later relaxation of meta-stable defects. This research is supported by the DARPA QuSen program.