Abstract
Dark matter is a milestone in the understanding of the Universe and a portal to the discovery of new physics beyond the Standard Model of particles. The direct search for dark matter has become one of the most active fields of experimental physics in the last few decades. Liquid Xenon (LXe) detectors demonstrated the highest sensitivities to the main dark matter candidates (Weakly Interactive Massive Particles, WIMP). The experiments of the XENON project, located in the underground INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy, are leading the field thanks to the dual-phase LXe time projection chamber (TPC) technology. Since the first prototype XENON10 built in 2005, each detector of the XENON project achieved the highest sensitivity to WIMP dark matter. XENON increased the LXe target mass by nearly a factor 400, up to the 5.9 t of the current XENONnT detector installed at LNGS in 2020. Thanks to an unprecedentedly low background level, XENON1T (predecessor of XENONnT) set the world best limits on WIMP dark matter to date, for an overall boost of more than 3 orders of magnitude to the experimental sensitivity since the XENON project started. In this work, we review the principles of direct dark matter detection with LXe TPCs, the detectors of the XENON project, the challenges posed by background mitigation to ultra-low levels, and the main results achieved by the XENON project in the search for dark matter.
Highlights
Ordinary matter described by the Standard Model (SM) of particles contributes to less than 20% of the total mass budget of the Universe [1]
An additional port in the bottom dome of the cryostat allows for extracting Liquid Xenon (LXe) from the time projection chamber (TPC) to be circulated in a newly developed Xenon purification system in liquid phase, in addition to the already existing gaseous Xenon (GXe) purification loop
The dark matter direct detection (DD) approach is described with particular emphasis on the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) paradigma and in the context of Xenon-based detectors
Summary
Ordinary matter described by the Standard Model (SM) of particles contributes to less than 20% of the total mass budget of the Universe [1]. The LXe TPC technology is the foundation of the XENON project, which operated its first detector in 2005: the XENON10 prototype, with O(10) kg LXe target mass, installed at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS). Since both XENON and LNGS have been the front-runners in the direct DM search, thanks to progressively improved detectors and by hosting numerous successful DM experiments, respectively. This followed an earlier suggestion by Drukier and Stodolsky [19] to detect solar and reactor neutrinos via elastic neutral-current scattering off nuclei
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