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

[TRIUMF Seminars]

Date/Time: Thu 2020-02-20 at 14:00

Location:  Auditorium          

Speaker:   C Eric Dahl (Northwestern)

Title:     Dark Matter Detection with Superheated Noble Liquids

Abstract: Progress in dark matter detection over the past decade has come primarily from incremental improvements in existing technologies, culminating in the U.S. with the "Generation-2" experiments LZ and SuperCDMS.  To move beyond G2 new ideas are needed, both to search in new directions in dark matter parameter space and to defeat new backgrounds as we dig deeper into well-travelled spaces.  I will describe the challenges we are facing, note where our most successful technologies to date fall short, and describe in detail a new technique under development by the Scintillating Bubble Chamber Collaboration using superheated noble liquids.
In a Scintillating Bubble Chamber, the nuclear recoil from a WIMP interaction simultaneously nucleates a bubble and creates a flash of scintillation light.  On paper, this technique combines the electron recoil discrimination of a bubble chamber with the event-by-event energy reconstruction of a scintillator.  In practice, these two signals conspire to allow scintillating bubble chambers to run at much lower thresholds than can be achieved in any other discriminating detector.  Superheated noble liquids, in particular, may be completely insensitive to electron recoils even when running at thresholds as low as 100 eV.  I will describe our current understanding of why superheated noble liquids can reach these low thresholds, review the unique dark matter and neutrino physics open to a detector capable of electron/nuclear recoil discrimination at sub-keV energies, and update our progress on the first physics-scale scintillating bubble chamber, a 10-kg argon detector now under construction at Fermilab.



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