- Title Information
- Title
- A Position-Sensitive Liquid Xenon
Time-Projection Chamber for Direct Detection of Dark Matter: The XENON10
Experiment
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Sorensen, Peter F
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2008
- Physical Description
- Extent
- x, 195 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2008)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Gaitskell, Richard
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Robert, Lanou
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Dell'Antonio, Ian
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Physics
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- Recent astrophsyical observations indicate that
about 23% of the matter in the universe exists as non-luminous,
non-baryonic dark matter. General thermodynamic arguments suggest that
if an as-yet undiscovered weakly interacting particle were in thermal
equilibrium in the early universe, it could have a cosmologically
interesting relic abundance today. Dark matter particles are predicted
to have collapsed into isothermal halos on a galactic scale. Minimal
super-symmetric extensions of the standard model predict the existence
of a stable particle with a mass in the range 10-1000 GeV
c<sup>-2</sup>, and a an interaction cross section with ordinary matter
σχ < 10<sup>-36</sup> cm<sup>2</sup>. For the past two
decades, numerous experiments have been deployed with the aim of direct
or indirect detection of dark matter. XENON10 is a direct-detection
liquid Xe experiment, with event-by-event 3D position reconstruction.
Since dark matter does not interact electromagnetically, it's signature
in a Xe detector is expected to be a low-energy nuclear recoil.
Particle interactions in Xe create scintillation light (<em>S</em>1) and
ionization. The ionization is drifted across the active Xe target and
converted into a proportional scintillation signal (<em>S</em>2) by an
external electric field. The ratio y = log10(<em>S</em>2/<em>S</em>1)
is larger for β and ɣ background events than for nuclear
recoils, as determined by neutron calibration data. This allows
event-by-event discrimination of background from the expected signal.
In 2007 XENON10 eclipsed CDMS II as the most sensitive direct-detection
experiment, excluding the existence of particle dark matter with a
cross-section (normalized to a single nucleon) σχ >
10<sup>-43</sup> cm<sup>2</sup> at a particle mass of 100 GeV
c<sup>-2</sup> (90% C.L.). Liquid Xe technology is extremely promising
since it is easily scaled to larger target mass, which will allow
greater sensitivity to particle dark matter interactions. I discuss the
XENON10 detector, deployment, operation, analysis and dark matter
exclusion results. I also present a new method to determine the light
yield of Xe for nuclear recoils, which is essential for calibrating the
nuclear recoil energy scale and understanding the detector
threshold.
- Subject
- Topic
- WIMP
- Subject
- Topic
- dark matter
- Subject
- Topic
- liquid Xe
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/887854")
- Topic
- Dark matter (Astronomy)
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20110926
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0V1231M
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations