Speaker
Description
Bubble chambers are a detector technology that has experienced renewed interest in particle physics in recent years, particularly for dark matter searches. By employing a superheated liquid target, bubble chambers enable dual-channel event discrimination through correlated optical and acoustic signals generated during bubble nucleation. The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) experiment advances 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 electron-recoil suppression of bubble chambers, enabling SBC to target energy thresholds of $\mathcal{O}(100\space\mathrm{eV})$. The collaboration is concurrently developing two near-identical 10-kg liquid-argon detectors at Fermilab's MINOS Hall in Batavia, Illinois (SBC-LAr10) and at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario (SBC-SNOLAB). SBC-LAr10 has recently concluded its first operational phase, and this talk will present early results from that period. Its physics programme focuses on detector 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 also cover recent hardware developments for SBC-SNOLAB, as well as the timeline for the next phase of the experiment ahead of the planned installation later this year.
| 14cdg4@queensu.ca | |
| Affiliation | Queen's University |
| Research Theme | Dark Matter |