Würzburg 2018 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 52: Suche nach dunkler Materie III

T 52.4: Talk

Wednesday, March 21, 2018, 17:25–17:40, Philo-HS5

Electronic recoil background in the XENON1T experiment — •Miguel Angel Vargas — Institut für Kernphysik, WWU Münster, Germany

The XENON1T experiment aims at finding direct evidence for dark matter through the scattering of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with target nuclei in an ultra-low background dual-phase xenon Time Projection Chamber (TPC) based detector that employs about 2 tons sensitive volume of liquid xenon.

In order to reach its projected sensitivity a robust estimation of the background rate in the detector is a key ingredient. Therefore, the background sources are divided in two main classes for their analysis: electronic recoils (ER) off the atomic electrons and nuclear recoils (NR) off the Xe nuclei.

This talk focuses on the ER backgrounds sources: from radioactivity in the detector materials, sources intrinsic to the LXe (beta decay of Kr-85, of Rn-222 and its daughters, and Xe-136 double-beta decay) and from solar neutrinos scattering off electrons. Their understanding is used to predict the potential statistical leakage of ER events into the NR region, which could mimic a WIMP signal.

"This work is supported by BMBF under contract05A17PM2 and by DFG through Research Training Group 2149."