Development of a super-resolution optical microscope for directional dark matter search experiment.

Nuclear emulsion is a perfect choice for a detector for directional DM search because of its high density and excellent position accuracy. The minimal detectable track length of a recoil nucleus in emulsion is required to be at least 100 nm, making the resolution of conventional optical microscopes insufficient to resolve them. Here we report about the R&D on a super-resolution optical microscope to be used in future directional DM search experiments with nuclear emulsion as a detector media. The microscope will be fully automatic, will use novel image acquisition and analysis techniques, will achieve the spatial resolution of the order of few tens of nm and will be capable of reconstructing recoil tracks with the length of at least 100 nm with high angular resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]