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Neutrino physics has been going through rapid developments since the particle was first proposed by Pauli. The observation of neutrino oscillations has prompted an investigation of the issue of neutrino mass, with the "seesaw" mechanism garnering theoretical support. The HUNTER (Heavy Unseen Neutrinos from the Total Energy-momentum Reconstruction) experiment brings together AMO, nuclear physics and high energy physics researchers from Temple University, Houston University, UCLA and Princeton University to develop an apparatus capable of probing the keV-mass range of sterile neutrinos with high precision. The HUNTER detector makes use of the well-established COLTRIMS techniques for the collection of all the decay products of a neutrino-producing decay, and the reconstruction of their initial momenta and energies. Energy and momentum conservation allow then for the reconstruction of the missing neutrino mass.Electrons produced in the decay are guided towards their detector by an optimized set of electrodes paired to a magnetic field to confine their trajectories into spirals. A magnetic shield protects the electron from external stray fields that could alter their trajectories. A thorough study on the main source of background, namely the source scattering of ions, was conducted. As an additional topic, the feasibility of a directional-sensitive dark matter search experiment has been studied. Simple models of galactic dark matter distribution suggest that the motion of the Earth in space might introduce a directional anisotropy in the WIMPs momentum distribution at the Earth. The shape of a WIMP-like recoil in a target material could be be used to extract directional information for the incident WIMP, and thus confirm the anisotropy. The peculiar microphysics of liquid Argon requires thermalization of ionization electrons for a signal to form. To determine if directional information can be extracted, one needs to understand the energy spectrum of the electrons emitted in recoil event. Then, one needs a model to determine the time scale of the thermalization, and the distance to which the electrons travel. / Physics

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Liquid argon is an attractive target for dark matter searches due to its low cost and exemplary event discrimination. However, atmospherically derived argon contains the beta-emitter 39Ar which confounds the growth of dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC) style detectors to the ton-scale. The DarkSide Collaboration seeks to bypass this limitation by extracting argon from deep underground, from a location known to contain significantly less 39Ar than atmospherically derived argon. This thesis will summarize the e orts taken to produce the first batch of underground argon, focusing on the first operation of the underground argon in a dual-phase TPC to validate the purity of the product, performed at Fermilab using the SCENE cryostat.

This licentiate thesis in theoretical physics focuses on the existence of quantum features in physical systems such as axion dark matter and gravity. Our focus is mostly on effects which appear at low energies, a regime in which our models can be confronted with current experiments or within the foreseeable future. In our first project, we focus on squeezing of axion dark matter, a quantum mechanical effect which accompanies the standard mean field description of axions. We have showed that within a reasonable set of assumptions, the quantum state of axions is highly squeezed. This theoretical finding suggests that the mean field description of axion dark matter is incomplete, since the latter conceals many interesting and possibly experimentally relevant phenomena, and paves the way for axion dark matter studies beyond the mean field approximation. Moreover, in this thesis, some ongoing work on axion dark matter decoherence is presented. Our goal is to test whether axion dark matter squeezing is robust against decoherence. Preliminary results indicate that squeezing is not diminished in presence of environmental interactions. Our results stem from an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection between cosmology, quantum optics, quantum open systems and cold atoms. Our second work focuses on quantum features of gravity. An almost century old question is how gravity can be reconciled with the laws of quantum mechanics. This question remains still open and part of the reason is the lack of experimental evidence. However, in recent years, the rapid progress of experimental techniques allows for quantum control and manipulation of larger and larger quantum systems. These new experimental routes have sparkled an interest in testing such fundamental questions with tabletop experiments. One particularly interesting proposal aims to test whether gravity can mediate entanglement between two spatially superposed mesoscopic masses. This proposal, in order to deduce the existence of quantized gravitational mediators, relies on a quantum-information-theoretic argument, the so-called LOCC (Local Operations and Classical Communication). In our work, we critically assess this proposal, its underlying assumptions and what teaches about quantum gravity. We conclude that the LOCC argument is not useful and by invoking it, one cannot unambiguously infer the existence of quantum mediators unless the principle oflocality is elevated to a fundamental principle of nature. We support our claim by explicitly showing that well known relativistic field theories, apart from local formulations can also admit non-local ones. Therefore, the entanglement generating quantum channel can be either local or non-local.

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