Speaker
Description
Liquid argon is an excellent target material in direct detection experiments searching for physics beyond the Standard Model. It is an abundant noble element, is transparent to its own scintillation light, and features exquisite performance in pulse-shape discrimination, enabling ultra-low-background searches. This talk will discuss results from DEAP-3600 and DarkSide-50 in the search for new particles, including light dark matter and solar axions. The sensitivity of next-generation detectors will also be explored: DarkSide-20k, a time projection chamber under construction at LNGS with essential Canadian contributions; ARGO, a 300-tonne fiducial mass detector being designed for deployment at SNOLAB; and AURORA, a proposed tonne-scale time projection chamber optimized as a low-threshold electron-counting measurement using only the ionization channel to have sensitivity to GeV-scale dark matter.