Speaker
Description
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is combining the well-established technologies of bubble chambers with a liquid-noble scintillating target to develop a detector sensitive to sub-keV nuclear recoils with the goal of a GeV-scale WIMP dark matter search. Bubble chambers provide excellent electron recoil suppression, down to sub-keV thresholds as proven by a prototype xenon bubble chamber (XeBC), while scintillation signals from the liquid noble target facilitate event-by-event energy reconstruction. Two detectors are currently under development: SBC-LAr10 and SBC-SNOLAB. SBC-LAr10, operating in the MINOS tunnel at Fermilab, serves as a platform for detector commissioning, calibration, and engineering studies, with the objective of demonstrating stable operation at thresholds near 100 eV. SBC-SNOLAB is a radiopure replica of SBC-LAr10 designed for deployment at SNOLAB near Sudbury, Ontario, where it will operate in a deep underground, low-background environment. Both detectors employ a xenon-doped liquid argon target instrumented with scintillation, acoustic, and optical imaging readout systems. This talk will present the calibration program performed with SBC-LAr10 and its implications for SBC-SNOLAB, as well as recent progress toward a quasi-background-free WIMP search with SBC-SNOLAB.
| Keyword-1 | Dark matter search |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | Liquid argon bubble chamber |
| Keyword-3 | Low background techniques |