Speaker
Mr
Alan Robinson
(University of Chicago)
Description
The recently formed PICO collaboration, a merger of COUPP and PICASSO, is designing a 250L bubble chamber to search for dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). This experiment will have nearly four orders of magnitude greater sensitivity to spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon interactions as compared to our existing world-best results. We operate bubble chambers with thresholds below 3 keV in nuclear recoil energy and with electron recoil background rejection better than 10^{9}. This impressive sensitivity will probe a broad range models for WIMP dark matter that experiments concentrating on spin-independent couplings cannot reach.
We are presently operating the PICO-2L and COUPP-60 bubble chambers deep underground to test systems that will be used in the 250L experiment and to extend our dark matter search limits. Recent results and calibrations from these experiments will be presented.
Primary author
Mr
Alan Robinson
(University of Chicago)
