Speakers
Pietro Giampa
(Queen's University)Dr
Tina Pollmann
(Laurentian University)
Description
The current standard model of cosmology relies on the presence of vast amounts of Dark Matter throughout the universe, made from particles that have never been observed in the laboratory. New particles are also predicted from the side of particle physics, where they arise in theoretical extensions that would make the standard model of particle physics consistent. The new particle favoured for constituting Dark Matter is the so-called WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particle. Detecting these particles, should they exist, and ascertaining their properties is a challenging tasks due to their weak interaction strength and very low interaction cross sections.
The DEAP-3600 experiment, located 2 km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada, uses a 3.6 ton single-phase liquid argon target for a sensitive Dark Matter search. The projected sensitivity to the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross-section is 10^−46 cm^2,
about one order of magnitude improvement over current searches at 100 GeV
WIMP mass. Beside locating the detector deep underground, this high sensitivity is achieved through careful detector design and material selection.
We present the overall design and construction of the DEAP-3600 detector.
Authors
Mr
Koby Dering
(Queen's University)
Pietro Giampa
(Queen's University)
Dr
Tina Pollmann
(Laurentian University)
