Status and prospects of SABRE North

Abstract

SABRE is an experiment to search for galactic dark matter (DM) through the annual modulation effect and to perform a model-independent test of the long-standing DAMA result. The ambitious program of SABRE foresees two detectors in underground locations in the two Earth’s hemispheres: SABRE North at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy and SABRE South at Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) in Australia. We present the status and prospects of SABRE North activities, namely the characterization of a low background NaI(Tl) crystal in two different setups at LNGS. The former Proof-of-Principle (PoP) detector was equipped with a liquid scintillator (LS) veto and collected data for about one month. The latter, called PoP-dry setup, featured a purely passive shielding and collected data for almost one year. The average background in the energy region of interest (1-6 keV) for DM search was 1.20 ± 0.05 and 1.39 ± 0.02 counts/day/kg/keV within the PoP and the PoP-dry setup, respectively. The main features of the background in the crystal have been addressed with both the PoP and the PoP-dry setup. Upcoming activities and future perspectives of SABRE North are discussed, together with a brief mention of the status of SABRE South.