The XENON dark matter search experiment

By E. Aprile, K. Giboni, P. Majewski, Kaixuan Ni, M. Yamashita, R. Gaitskell, P. Sorensen, L. deViveiros, L. Baudis, A. Bernstein and 7 more. 2004

443 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The XENON experiment aims at the direct detection of dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) via their elastic scattering off Xe nuclei. A fiducial mass of 1000 kg, distributed in 10 independent liquid xenon time projection chambers will be used to probe the lowest interaction cross-section predicted by SUSY models. The TPCs are operated in dual (liquid/gas) phase, to allow a measurement of nuclear recoils down to 16 keV energy, via simultaneous detection of the ionization, through secondary scintillation in the gas, and primary scintillation in the liquid. The distinct ratio of primary to secondary scintillation for nuclear recoils from WIMPs (or neutrons), and for electron recoils from background, is key to the event-by-event discrimination capability of XENON. A dual phase xenon prototype has been realized and is currently being tested, along with other prototypes dedicated to other measurements relevant to the XENON program. As part of the R&D phase, we will realize and move underground a first XENON module (XENON10) with at least 10 kg fiducial mass to measure the background rejection capability and to optimize the conditions for continuous and stable detector operation underground. We present some of the results from the on-going R&D and summarize the expected performance of the 10 kg experiment, from Monte-Carlo simulations. The main design features of the 100 kg detector unit(XENON100), with which we envisage to make up the 1 ton sensitive mass of XENON1T will also be presented.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58c0d7bfd699d78b78959c4bdf9602e554a6d059

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Citations in the corpus

Constraining dark sectors with monojets and dijets (2015, methodology): “A three-year projection considering the LHC with an integrated luminosity of 100fb−1 at 14 TeV and a direct detection experiment based on liquid xenon with a total exposure of 2 ton-years (like XENON1T [88]).”
KINEMATICAL AND CHEMICAL VERTICAL STRUCTURE OF THE GALACTIC THICK DISK. II. A LACK OF DARK MATTER IN THE SOLAR NEIGHBORHOOD, (2012, background): “The results of these experiments are degenerate between the unknown interaction cross-section of the searched particles and their local density (e.g., Gaitskell 2004; Aprile et al. 2005).”
Testing electroweak baryogenesis with future colliders (2014, background): “The light green shaded region can be probed by XENON1T [101].”
Dark matter and neutrino masses from a scale-invariant multi-Higgs portal (2015, methodology): “12), we evaluate the spin independent cross section for various MX and MN masses and then, using the experimental results from LUX (2013) [116] and the projected limits from XENON 1T [117], we construct the plot shown in Fig.”