Scintillating Bubble Chambers for Rare Event Searches

Journal Article · Tue Jul 25 04:00:00 EDT 2023 · Universe

DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/universe9080346· OSTI ID:2202831

Alfonso-Pita, Ernesto ^[1]; Behnke, Edward ^[2]; Bressler, Matthew ^[3]; Broerman, Benjamin ^[4]; Clark, Kenneth ^[4]; Corbett, Jonathan ^[4]; Dahl, C. Eric ^[5]; Dering, Koby ^[4]; de St. Croix, Austin ^[4]; Durnford, Daniel ^[6]; Giampa, Pietro ^[7]; Hall, Jeter ^[8]; Harris, Orin ^[9]; Hawley-Herrera, Hector ^[4]; Jackson, Christopher M. ^[10]; Ko, Youngtak ^[6]; Lamb, Noah ^[3]; Laurin, Mathieu ^[11]; Levine, Ilan ^[2]; Lippincott, W. Hugh ^[12] ; Liu, Xingxin ^[13]; Neilson, Russell ^[3]; Piro, Marie-Cécile ^[6]; Priya, Shashank ^[14]; Pyda, Daniel ^[3]; Sheng, Zhiheng ^[13]; Sweeney, Gary ^[4]; Vázquez-Jáuregui, Eric ^[1]; Westerdale, Shawn ^[15]; Whitis, Thomas J. ^[12]; Wright, Alexander ^[4]; Zha, Wei ^[13]; Zhang, Ryan ^[12]

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1. Univ. Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City (Mexico)
2. Indiana Univ., South Bend, IN (United States)
3. Drexel Univ., Philadelphia, PA (United States)
4. Queen's Univ., Kingston, ON (Canada)
5. Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States); Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
6. Univ. of Alberta, Edmonton, AB (Canada)
7. Queen's Univ., Kingston, ON (Canada); TRIUMF, Vancouver, BC (Canada)
8. SNOLAB, Lively, ON (Canada)
9. Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL (United States)
10. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
11. Univ. of Montreal, QC (Canada)
12. Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, CA (United States)
13. Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
14. Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
15. Univ. of California, Riverside, CA (United States)

The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is developing liquid-noble bubble chambers for the detection of sub-keV nuclear recoils. These detectors benefit from the electron recoil rejection inherent in moderately-superheated bubble chambers with the addition of energy reconstruction provided from the scintillation signal. The ability to measure low-energy nuclear recoils allows the search for GeV-scale dark matter and the measurement of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering on argon from MeV-scale reactor antineutrinos. The first physics-scale detector, SBC-LAr10, is in the commissioning phase at Fermilab, where extensive engineering and calibration studies will be performed. In parallel, a functionally identical low-background version, SBC-SNOLAB, is being built for a dark matter search underground at SNOLAB. SBC-SNOLAB, with a 10 kg-yr exposure, will have sensitivity to a dark matter–nucleon cross section of 2×10^–42 cm² at 1 GeV/c² dark matter mass, and future detectors could reach the boundary of the argon neutrino fog with a tonne-yr exposure. In addition, the deployment of an SBC detector at a nuclear reactor could enable neutrino physics investigations including measurements of the weak mixing angle and searches for sterile neutrinos, the neutrino magnetic moment, and the light Z’ gauge boson.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States); Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP); USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program; National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-07CH11359; SC0015910; SC0017815; SC0011702
• OSTI ID: 2202831
• Report Number(s): FERMILAB-PUB--23-584-V; oai:inspirehep.net:2694887
• Journal Information: Universe, Journal Name: Universe Journal Issue: 8 Vol. 9; ISSN 2218-1997
• Publisher: MDPI
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Bubble chambers
Dark matter
Liquid argon
Metastable fluids
Neutrinos