Scintillation characteristics of an undoped CsI crystal at low-temperature for dark matter search

The scintillation characteristics of 1 g undoped CsI crystal were studied by directly coupling two silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) over a temperature range from room temperature to 86 K. The scintillation decay time and light output were measured using x-ray and gamma-ray peaks from a $^{109}$Cd radioactive source. An increase in decay time was observed as the temperature decreased from room temperature to 86 K, ranging from 76 ns to 605 ns. The light output increased as well, reaching 37.9 $\pm$ 1.5 photoelectrons per keV electron-equivalent at 86 K, which is approximately 18 times higher than the light yield at room temperature. Leveraging the significantly enhanced scintillation light output of the undoped CsI crystal at low temperature, coupling it with SiPMs results into a promising detector for dark matter search. Both cesium and iodine have a proton odd number, thus they are suitable targets to probe dark matter-proton spin dependent interactions. We evaluated the sensitivity of the detector here proposed to light dark matter-proton spin dependent interactions. We included the Migdal effect and assumed 200\,kg of undoped CsI crystals for the dark matter search. We conclude that undoped CsI coupled to SiPM can exhibit world-competitive sensitivities for low-mass dark matter detection, particularly for the dark matter-proton spin-dependent interaction.