[Triumf-seminars] TRIUMF Colloquium today at 14:00

[TRIUMF Seminars]

Date/Time: Thu 2014-11-13 at 14:00

Location:  Auditorium          

Speaker:   Hugh Lippincott (Fermilab)

Title:     Searching for dark matter with bubble chambers

Abstract: The PICO Collaboration (formed from the recent merger of the Chicago-based COUPP and the Canadian-based PICASSO experiments) uses bubble chambers to search for dark matter particles. Unlike the bubble chambers of the 1960s and 1970s, PICO chambers are operated in only mildly superheated conditions, rendering them insensitive to the minimum ionizing particles that typically constitute the largest background in dark matter searches. The bubble chamber allows for rejection of other backgrounds as well - for example, alpha decays can be discriminated from signal events because they sound louder. The result is a detector with minimal backgrounds that can be scaled to large masses. I will introduce the field of direct detection of dark matter and discuss the status of PICO, including results from the first PICO detector operated at SNOLAB (PICO-2L) and give a progress report on COUPP-60, a larger bubble chamber also at SNOLAB.

Stimulants available 15 minutes before the talk.

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General TRIUMF seminar information available at http://www.triumf.ca/home/upcoming-events/about-seminars-lectures