Abstract

DarkSide-50 (DS-50) at Gran Sasso underground laboratory (LNGS), Italy, is a direct dark matter search experiment based on a TPC with liquid argon. DS-50 has completed its first dark matter run using atmospheric argon as target. The DS-50 detector performances and the results of the first physics run are reviewed in this proceeding.

Highlights

  • Many experimental results in cosmology and astrophysics brings pieces of evidence for the existence of Dark Matter

  • The LAr time projection chambers (TPCs) can exploit pulse shape discrimination and the ratio of scintillation to ionization to reject beta and gamma background in favor of the nuclear recoil events expected from Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs) scattering [2, 3]

  • Even with the reduced levels of 39Ar in underground argon, if its activity is near the measured upper limit [19], 39Ar β decay will still be the dominant background in DS-50

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Summary

Introduction

Direct observation of WIMP-nuclei collisions in a laboratory detector plays a key role in dark matter searches. It poses at the same time significant experimental challenges, as the expected signals are low in energy (below 100 keV) and very rare (a few interactions per year per ton of target, based on existing limits). Ultra low background and underground detectors with target masses of 0.1-10 tons are mandatory to detect these WIMPs. The DarkSide project attempts to detect WIMPinduced nuclear recoils using two-phase Argon time projection chambers (TPCs) with scalable, zerobackground technology. A key feature of DarkSide is its water and liquid scintillator veto system with further suppresses radiogenic and cosmogenic backgrounds. The TMB has been removed since June 2014 and a source of low-activity TMB identified

The DarkSide-50 detector
Data acquisition and event reconstruction
Data analysis and WIMP search
Findings
Conclusions and outlook
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