Speaker
Description
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) Collaboration develops noble liquid bubble chambers for the detection of low-mass (GeV-scale) particle dark matter and coherent neutrino scattering (CEvNS) at nuclear reactors. Like other bubble chamber dark matter detection efforts, SBC relies on the intrinsic background discrimination seen in superheated fluids: nuclear recoils from WIMP and neutrino interactions in the superheated target of the bubble chamber nucleate a single bubble, while electronic recoils from background beta decays and gamma rays do not. By using a noble liquid target, SBC extends this discrimination to much lower thresholds than achievable in other liquids while also adding a scintillation signal for event-by-event energy reconstruction. SBC-LAr10 is the collaboration’s first physics-scale device, operating at Fermilab and designed to superheat a 10-kg argon target to bubble nucleation thresholds as low as 40 eV. SBC-LAr10 saw its first bubbles in October 2025, beginning a calibration campaign to evaluate the physics reach of this new detector technology. This talk will provide an overview of the SBC experiment and report on early results from the calibration campaign.
| Research Area | Dark Matter: direct detection |
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