Karlsruhe 2011 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 106: Niederenergie-Neutrinophysik/Suche nach dunkler Materie III

T 106.4: Talk

Wednesday, March 30, 2011, 17:35–17:50, 30.95: 121

Operating the Gridpix detector in Dark Matter Search Experiments — •Rolf Schön — Nikhef, Amsterdam, Niederlande

The DARWIN design study aims to use liquid argon (LAr) and liquid xenon (LXe) targets to look for nuclear recoils due to Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. The typical detector setups use a combination of scintillation and ionization electron detection to discriminate nuclear from background electron recoils. Gridpix, a gas-filled detector composed of a Micromegas-like amplification grid on a pixelized read-out chip, can achieve a single-electron detection efficiency of about 95%, and may be well-suited to identify the ionization electrons. We are presently testing Gridpix at noble liquid temperatures. It was recently shown to operate at -73°C.

This talk will present the status of Gridpix testing, with an ultimate goal of operating the detector at LXe (-110°C) and LAr (-185°C) temperatures.