Speaker
Description
Bubble chamber technology has been a mainstay of the particle detection landscape since its invention in the 1950s. By employing a superheated liquid target, bubble chambers enable dual-channel particle identification through correlated visual and acoustic signals generated during bubble nucleation. The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) experiment is advancing this well-established detector concept to extend sensitivity into the sub-keV nuclear-recoil regime. The use of a scintillating target, such as liquid argon, provides additional information for energy reconstruction while preserving the intrinsic electronic-recoil suppression of bubble chambers, enabling SBC to target energy thresholds of O(100 eV). The collaboration is concurrently developing two near-identical 10-kg liquid-argon detectors at Fermilab (SBC-LAr10) and SNOLAB (SBC-SNOLAB). SBC-LAr10 has recently begun operation, and this talk will present early results from this initial phase of operation. Its physics programme focuses on calibration and coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering studies, while also serving as an engineering testbed for the forthcoming SBC-SNOLAB detector. The latter detector is being purpose-built for GeV-scale dark matter searches, enabled by the ultra-low-background environment at SNOLAB. This talk will highlight recent hardware developments at Queen’s University in preparation for the construction of SBC-SNOLAB, including testing of an array of custom FBK VUV HD3 silicon photomultipliers, camera integration, and the development of data acquisition and event readout methodologies, building on the successes and lessons learned from SBC-LAr10.
| Keyword-1 | Dark Matter |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | CEvNS |
| Keyword-3 | Bubble Chamber |