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Register a new userThe DRIFT Dark Matter Experiments
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The current status of the DRIFT (Directional Recoil Identification From Tracks) experiment at Boulby Mine is presented, including the latest limits on the WIMP spin-dependent cross-section from 1.5 kg days of running with a mixture of CS2 and CF4. Planned upgrades to DRIFT IId are detailed, along with ongoing work towards DRIFT III, which aims to be the worlds first 10 m3-scale directional Dark Matter detector.
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In the past decades, several detector technologies have been developed with the quest to directly detect dark matter interactions and to test one of the most important unsolved questions in modern physics. The sensitivity of these experiments has improved with a tremendous speed due to a constant development of the detectors and analysis methods, proving uniquely suited devices to solve the dark matter puzzle, as all other discovery strategies can only indirectly infer its existence. Despite the overwhelming evidence for dark matter from cosmological indications at small and large scales, a clear evidence for a particle explaining these observations remains absent. This review summarises the status of direct dark matter searches, focussing on the detector technologies used to directly detect a dark matter particle producing recoil energies in the keV energy scale. The phenomenological signal expectations, main background sources, statistical treatment of data and calibration strategies are discussed.
The nature of dark matter is still an open problem, but there is evidence that a large part of the dark matter in the universe is non-baryonic, non-luminous and non-relativistic and hypothetical Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are candidates that satisfy all of the above criteria. In order to minimize the ambiguities in the identification of WIMPs interactions in their search, in more experiments, two distinct quantities are simultaneously measured: the ionization and phonon or light from scintillation signals. Silicon and germanium crystals are used in some experiments. In this paper we discuss the production of defects in semiconductors due to WIMP interactions and estimate their contribution in the energy balance. This phenomenon is present at all temperatures, is important in the range of keV energies, but is not taken into consideration in the usual analysis of experimental signals and could introduce errors in identification for WIMPs.
Radon gas emanating from materials is of interest in environmental science and also a major concern in rare event non-accelerator particle physics experiments such as dark matter and double beta decay searches, where it is a major source of background. Notable for dark matter experiments is the production of radon progeny recoils (RPRs), the low energy (~100 keV) recoils of radon daughter isotopes, which can mimic the signal expected from WIMP interactions. Presented here are results of measurements of radon emanation from detector materials in the 1 metre cubed DRIFT-II directional dark matter gas time projection chamber experiment. Construction and operation of a radon emanation facility for this work is described, along with an analysis to continuously monitor DRIFT data for the presence of internal 222Rn and 218Po. Applying this analysis to historical DRIFT data, we show how systematic substitution of detector materials for alternatives, selected by this device for low radon emanation, has resulted in a factor of ~10 reduction in internal radon rates. Levels are found to be consistent with the sum from separate radon emanation measurements of the internal materials and also with direct measurement using an attached alpha spectrometer. The current DRIFT detector, DRIFT-IId, is found to have sensitivity to 222Rn of 2.5 {mu}Bq/l with current analysis efficiency, potentially opening up DRIFT technology as a new tool for sensitive radon assay of materials.
The direct search for dark matter is entering a period of increased sensitivity to the hypothetical Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). One such technology that is being examined is a scintillation only noble liquid experiment, MiniCLEAN. MiniCLEAN utilizes over 500 kg of liquid cryogen to detect nuclear recoils from WIMP dark matter and serves as a demonstration for a future detector of order 50 to 100 tonnes. The liquid cryogen is interchangeable between argon and neon to study the A$^{2}$ dependence of the potential signal and examine backgrounds. MiniCLEAN utilizes a unique modular design with spherical geometry to maximize the light yield using cold photomultiplier tubes in a single-phase detector. Pulse shape discrimination techniques are used to separate nuclear recoil signals from electron recoil backgrounds. MiniCLEAN will be spiked with additional $^{39}$Ar to demonstrate the effective reach of the pulse shape discrimination capability. Assembly of the experiment is underway at SNOLAB and an update on the project is given.
We present measurements of the electron-recoil (ER) response of the LUX dark matter detector based upon 170,000 highly pure and spatially-uniform tritium decays. We reconstruct the tritium energy spectrum using the combined energy model and find good agreement with expectations. We report the average charge and light yields of ER events in liquid xenon at 180 V/cm and 105 V/cm and compare the results to the NEST model. We also measure the mean charge recombination fraction and its fluctuations, and we investigate the location and width of the LUX ER band. These results provide input to a re-analysis of the LUX Run3 WIMP search.
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