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XENON opens a new era for dark-matter searches

15 January 2016

The first physics run is envisaged to start early this year.

In recent years, evidence for the existence of dark matter from astrophysical observations has become indisputable. Although the nature of dark matter remains unknown, many theoretically motivated candidates have been proposed. Among them, the most popular ones are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with predicted masses in the range from a few GeV/c2 to TeV/c2 and with interaction strengths roughly on the weak scale.

WIMPs are being searched for using three complementary techniques: indirectly, by detecting the secondary products of WIMP annihilation or decay in celestial bodies; by producing WIMPs at colliders, foremost the LHC; and by direct detection, by measuring the energy of recoiling nuclei produced by collisions with WIMPs in low-background detectors.

On 11 November 2015, the most sensitive detector for the direct detection of WIMPs, XENON1T, was inaugurated at the Italian Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) – the largest underground laboratory in the world. XENON1T, led by Elena Aprile of Columbia University, was built and is operated by a collaboration of 21 research groups from France, Germany, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Arabic Emirates and the US. In total, about 130 physicists are involved.

XENON1T is the current culmination of the XENON programme of dark matter direct-detection experiments. Starting with the 25 kg XENON10 detector about 10 years ago, the second phase of the experiment, XENON100 (CERN Courier October 2013 p13) with 161 kg, has been tremendously successful: in the summer of 2012, the XENON collaboration published results from a search for spin-independent WIMP–nucleon interactions that provided the most stringent constraints on WIMP dark matter, until superseded by the LUX experiment (CERN Courier December 2013 p8) with a larger target.

XENON100 has since then also provided a series of other important results, such as constraints on the spin-dependent WIMP nucleon cross-section, constraints on solar axions and galactic axion-like particles and, more recently, searches for annual rate modulations, which exclude WIMP–electron scattering that could have provided a dark-matter explanation of the signal observed by DAMA/LIBRA (CERN Courier November 2015 p10).

Low background is key

The new XENON1T detector has an estimated sensitivity that is a factor of 100 better than XENON100. This will be reached after about two years of data taking. With only one week of data-taking, XENON1T will be able to reach the current LUX limit, opening up a new phase in the search for dark matter in early 2016.

The XENON detectors are dual-phase time-projection chambers (TPCs) filled with liquid xenon (LXe) as the target material. Interactions of particles in the liquefied xenon give rise to prompt scintillation light and ionisation. The ionised electrons are drifted in a strong electric field and extracted into the gas above the liquid where a secondary scintillation signal is produced. Both scintillation signals are read out by arrays of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) placed above and below the target volume. The position of the interaction vertex can be reconstructed in 3D by using the hit pattern on the upper PMT array and the time delay between the prompt and secondary scintillation signal. The position reconstruction facilitates self-shielding by only selecting events that interact with the inner “fiducial” volume of the detector. Because of their small cross-section, WIMPs will interact only once in the detector, so the background (e.g. from neutrons) can be reduced further by selecting single-scatter interactions. Beta and gamma backgrounds are reduced by selecting events with a ratio of secondary-to-prompt signal that is typical for nuclear recoils.

The XENON1T detector is filled with about 3.5 tonnes of liquid xenon in total. Its TPC – 1 m high and 1 m in diameter in a cylindrical shape, laterally defined by highly reflective Teflon – is the largest liquid-xenon TPC ever built. Specially designed copper field-shaping electrodes ensure the uniformity of the drift field for the desired field strength of 1 kV/cm. The TPC’s active volume contains 2 tonnes of LXe viewed by two arrays of 3 inch PMTs – 121 at the bottom immersed in LXe and 127 on the top in the gaseous phase. The xenon gas is liquefied and kept at a temperature of about –95 °C by a system of pulse-tube refrigerators. The xenon gas is stored and can be recovered in liquid phase in a custom-designed stainless-steel sphere that can hold up to 7.6 tonnes of xenon in high-purity conditions. Figure 3 shows the XENON1T detector and service building situated in Hall B at LNGS. Figure 1 shows XENON collaborators active in assembling the TPC in a clean room above ground at LNGS.

The expected WIMP–nucleon interaction rate is less than 10 events in 1 tonne of xenon per year. Background rejection is therefore the key to success for direct-detection experiments. Externally induced backgrounds can be minimised by exploiting the self-shielding capabilities. In addition, the detector is surrounded by a cylindrical water vessel 10 m high and 9.6 m in diameter. It is equipped with PMTs to tag muons that could induce neutrons, with an efficiency of 99.9%.

For a detector the size of XENON1T, radioactive impurities in the detector materials and the xenon itself become the biggest challenge for background reduction. Extensive radiation-screening campaigns, using some of the world’s most sensitive germanium detectors, have been conducted, and high-purity PMTs have been specially developed by Hamamatsu in co-operation with the collaboration. Contamination of the xenon by radioactive radon (mainly 222Rn) and krypton (85Kr), which dominate the target-intrinsic background, led to the development of cryogenic-distillation techniques to suppress the abundance of these isotopes to unprecedented low levels.

The best scenario

After about two years of data taking, XENON1T will be able to probe spin-independent WIMP–nucleon cross-sections of 1.6 × 10–47 cm2 (at a WIMP mass of 50 GeV/c2), see figure 2. In popular scenarios involving supersymmetry, XENON1T will either discover WIMPs or will exclude most of the theoretically relevant parameter space. Following the inauguration, the first physics run is envisaged to start early this year.

Most of the infrastructure, for example the outer cryostat, the Cherenkov muon veto, the xenon cryogenics, the purification and storage systems and the data-acquisition system, has been dimensioned for a larger experiment, named XENONnT, which is designed to contain more than 7 tonnes of LXe. A new TPC, about 40% larger in diameter and height and equipped with about 400 PMTs, will replace the XENON1T TPC. The goal for XENONnT is to achieve another order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity within a few years of data taking. XENONnT is scheduled to start data taking in 2018.

• For further details, see www.xenon1t.org/.

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