1. Data-Driven Modeling of Electron Recoil Nucleation in PICO C$_3$F$_8$ Bubble Chambers
- Author
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Amole, C., Ardid, M., Arnquist, I. J., Asner, D. M., Baxter, D., Behnke, E., Bressler, M., Broerman, B., Cao, G., Chen, C. J., Chen, S., Chowdhury, U., Clark, K., Collar, J. I., Cooper, P. S., Coutu, C. B., Cowles, C., Crisler, M., Crowder, G., Cruz-Venegas, N. A., Dahl, C. E., Das, M., Fallows, S., Farine, J., Filgas, R., Fuentes, J., Girard, F., Giroux, G., Hackett, B., Hagen, A., Hall, J., Hardy, C., Harris, O., Hillier, T., Hoppe, E. W., Jackson, C. M., Jin, M., Klopfenstein, L., Kozynets, T., Krauss, C. B., Laurin, M., Lawson, I., Leblanc, A., Levine, I., Licciardi, C., Lippincott, W. H., Loer, B., Mamedov, F., Mitra, P., Moore, C., Nania, T., Neilson, R., Noble, A. J., Oedekerk, P., Ortega, A., Pal, S., Piro, M. -C., Plante, A., Priya, S., Robinson, A. E., Sahoo, S., Scallon, O., Seth, S., Sonnenschein, A., Starinski, N., ��tekl, I., Sullivan, T., Tardif, F., Tiwari, D., V��zquez-J��uregui, E., Wagner, J. M., Walkowski, N., Weima, E., Wichoski, U., Wierman, K., Woodley, W., Yan, Y., Zacek, V., and Zhang, J.
- Subjects
High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) ,High Energy Physics - Phenomenology ,Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) ,High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) ,Physics - Instrumentation and Detectors ,Physics::Instrumentation and Detectors ,Astrophysics::Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics ,FOS: Physical sciences ,High Energy Physics::Experiment ,Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) ,Nuclear Experiment ,Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics ,High Energy Physics - Experiment - Abstract
The primary advantage of moderately superheated bubble chamber detectors is their simultaneous sensitivity to nuclear recoils from WIMP dark matter and insensitivity to electron recoil backgrounds. A comprehensive analysis of PICO gamma calibration data demonstrates for the first time that electron recoils in C$_3$F$_8$ scale in accordance with a new nucleation mechanism, rather than one driven by a hot-spike as previously supposed. Using this semi-empirical model, bubble chamber nucleation thresholds may be tuned to be sensitive to lower energy nuclear recoils while maintaining excellent electron recoil rejection. The PICO-40L detector will exploit this model to achieve thermodynamic thresholds as low as 2.8 keV while being dominated by single-scatter events from coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering of solar neutrinos. In one year of operation, PICO-40L can improve existing leading limits from PICO on spin-dependent WIMP-proton coupling by nearly an order of magnitude for WIMP masses greater than 3 GeV c$^{-2}$ and will have the ability to surpass all existing non-xenon bounds on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon coupling for WIMP masses from 3 to 40 GeV c$^{-2}$., 18 pages, 12 figures
- Published
- 2019