First Results from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search Experiment at the Deep Site

Abstract

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment is designed to search for dark matter in the form of the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). For this purpose, CDMS uses detectors based on crystals of Ge and Si, operated at the temperature of 20 mK, and providing a two-fold signature of an interaction: the ionization and the athermal phonon signals. The two signals, along with the passive and active shielding of the experimental setup, and with the underground experimental sites, allow very effective suppression and rejection of different types of backgrounds. This dissertation presents the commissioning and the results of the first WIMP-search run performed by the CDMS collaboration at the deep underground site at the Soudan mine in Minnesota. We develop different methods of suppressing the dominant background due to the electron-recoil events taking place at the detector surface and we apply these algorithms to the data set. These results place the world's most sensitive limits on the WIMP-nucleon spin-independent elastic-scattering cross-section. Finally, they examine the compatibility of the supersymmetric WIMP-models with the direct-detection experiments (such as CDMS) and discuss the implications of the new CDMS result on these models.