SuperCDMS status from Soudan and plans for SNOLab
- Department of Physics, Texas A and M University, College Station, TX 77843 (United States)
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
- Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 (United States)
- Physics Institute, University of Zrich, Winterthurerstr. 190, CH-8057 (Switzerland)
- Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 (United States)
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL 60510 (United States)
Matter, as we know it, makes up less than 5% of the Universe. Various astrophysical observations have confirmed that one quarter of the Universe and most of the matter content in the Universe is made up of Dark Matter. The nature of Dark Matter is yet to be discovered and is one of the biggest questions in Physics. Particle Physics combined with astrophysical measurements of the abundance gives rise to a Dark Matter candidate called Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). The low density of WIMPs in the galaxies and the extremely weak nature of the interaction with ordinary matter make detection of the WIMP an extraordinarily challenging task, with abundant fakes from various radioactive and cosmogenic backgrounds with much stronger electromagnetic interaction. The extremely weak nature of the WIMP interaction dictates detectors that have extremely low naturally occurring radioactive background, a large active volume (mass) of sensitive detector material to maximize statistics, a highly efficient detector based rejection mechanism for the dominant electromagnetic background and sophisticated analysis techniques to reject any residual background. This paper describes the status of the SuperCDMS experiment.
- OSTI ID:
- 22118502
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1534, Issue 1; Conference: CETUP 2012: Workshop on dark matter, unification and neutrino physics, Lead-Deadwood, SD (United States), 10 Jul - 1 Aug 2012; Other Information: (c) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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