The XENON100 Dark Matter Experiment

by Dr Marc Schumann (University of Zurich)

Tuesday 29 Sept 2009, 17:00 → 18:00 Europe/Berlin

XENON100 aims to directly detect WIMPs by measuring nuclear recoils from WIMPs scattered on xenon nuclei. It is a dual phase liquid-gas time-projection-chamber (TPC) that provides 3D-event reconstruction and efficient discrimination between nuclear recoils and electron recoils. It is about 10x larger than its successful predecessor XENON10, housing 165 kg of high purity liquid xenon (LXe) with a target mass of about 65 kg and an active LXe veto of 100 kg. Detector design and material selection have been optimized to reduce the background about a factor 100 compared to XENON10 in order to reach previously unexplored WIMP parameter space down to cross sections of 10^-45 cm^2. The experiment is installed underground at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS), Italy. Measurements to characterize its performance and to calibrate the detector are well under way. In this talk, I will introduce XENON100 and the XENON Dark Matter program, present the status of the experiment, and show results achieved so far.