This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will be used to examine the possibility of operating a gas drift detector in which negative ions are drifted rather than electrons. Because negative ions diffuse much less than electrons during drift, it may be easier to achieve good spatial resolution of the drifting ions. One application of such a device would be to detect recoiling nuclei from elastic scattering of neutrinos. This could in turn be used to study physics questions associated with the spin and strangeness content of the nucleon, as well as searches for dark matter in the universe.
