21-26 July 2014
Renold Building
Europe/London timezone
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XENON searches for dark matter

Presented by Dr. Andrew BROWN on 25 Jul 2014 from 16:30 to 16:50
Type: Particle Cosmology
Track: Particle Cosmology

Content

The XENON project utilises liquid xenon Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) to search for terrestrial evidence of dark matter, looking for spin-dependent and spin-independent interactions of WIMPs, as well as axio-electric couplings of axions and axion-like particles. The most recent XENON experiment, XENON100, completed 225 live-days of data taking in 2012. This run lead to one of the most stringent limits on the spin-independent elastic-scattering cross-section of WIMP-like dark matter to date, with a limit of 2.0×10^-45 cm^2 for WIMPs of mass 55 GeV/c^2. A further XENON00 run with 154 live-days has completed and is soon to be un-blinded. Presently, XENON100 is set to test new calibrations, with a view to improve the understanding of nuclear recoil behaviour in liquid xenon and advanced calibration sources. The XENON project is quickly moving to its next step, XENON1T, which is currently under construction and will begin taking data next year. The sensitivity of XENON1T is expected to be 2 orders of magnitude greater than XENON100. Understanding how this new detector behaves is a key concern, and new calibration methods are under research to meet this concern. An upgrade for the XENON1T detector is also planned, with a designed sensitivity of a few times 10^-48 cm^2.

Place

Location: Renold
Room: F14

Primary authors

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