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2011
WIMP Dark Matter Detection with Liquid Xenon
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Pacific/Honolulu
WAT 420 (Watanabe Hall)
WAT 420
Watanabe Hall
Description
Discovery of the nature of dark matter is internationally recognized as one of the greatest contemporary challenges in science, fundamental to our understanding of the Universe. The most compelling candidates for dark matter are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that arise naturally in several models of physics beyond the Standard Model, such as Supersymmetry. The discovery of galactic WIMPs would therefore enlighten two of the outstanding problems of modern physics - the matter composition of the Universe and the extrapolation of the Standard Model of particle physics to GUT scales. Although no definitive signal has yet been discovered, the worldwide race towards direct detection has been dramatically accelerated by the remarkable progress and evolution of liquid xenon (LXe) time projection chambers (TPCs). They have shifted the scale of target mass by orders of magnitude whilst simultaneously reducing backgrounds to unprecedented low levels, and they now offer the best prospects for a positive detection.
Amongst the LXe experiments, it is the ZEPLIN and XENON phased programs, operated at Boulby Mine, UK, and Gran Sasso, Italy, respectively, that have produced the most sensitive results thus far. After an introduction to dark matter and direct detection I will describe the LXe TPC concept, focusing on the ZEPLIN-III instrument. I will present the recent results from the culmination of the UK’s ZEPLIN program, as well as from the ongoing XENON-100 detector - leading the field with the most sensitive limits on WIMP detection to date. Finally, with current generation devices now entering a particularly favorable region of electroweak physics but also approaching their limits of sensitivity, I will present the planned next generation XENON detector: XENON1T. Building on the advancements in LXe technology this instrument will offer well over an order of magnitude increase in sensitivity beyond the current state-of-the art, enabling the exploration of the bulk of favored parameter space in search of a first definitive WIMP signal on a timescale compatible with complimentary accelerator, ground and satellite based indirect searches.
