Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 22: Search for Dark Matter 1

T 22.4: Vortrag

Montag, 21. März 2022, 17:05–17:20, T-H35

Calibration of XENONnT with tagged neutrons in its TPC and water Cherenkov neutron veto — •Daniel Wenz — Institut für Physik & Exzellenzcluster PRISMA+, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany

For more than a decade, liquid xenon (LXe) time projection chambers (TPC) have been playing a key role in the direct search for WIMP dark matter and other rare events. In 2018, XENON1T set the most stringent limits for WIMP-nucleon couplings for masses above 6 GeV/c2. Building on this success, an even larger LXe TPC called XENONnT was built, which features a ~3-times larger target mass of 5.9 t. The experiment reuses much of the existing infrastructure of XENON1T, which has been augmented by additional sub-systems. One of these new systems is a water Cherenkov neutron veto encapsulating the TPC cryostat. Neutrons are capable of mimicking WIMP signals by undergoing a single-scatter nuclear recoil inside the TPC and escaping the TPC cryostat. The neutron veto system has the goal to reduce the intrinsic nuclear-recoil background by serving as an active veto for those neutrons.

In 2021, XENONnT successfully finished commissioning and started science data taking. In this talk, we will present the first results of XENONnT*s nuclear recoil calibration as well as the calibration of the neutron-veto tagging efficiency, using coincident gammas and neutrons from an Americium-Beryllium source.