Göttingen 2012 – scientific programme
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 112: Niederenergie-Neutrinophysik/Suche nach Dunkler Materie 7
T 112.3: Talk
Thursday, March 1, 2012, 17:20–17:35, ZHG 102
Monitoring the data quality during Dark Matter search with XENON100 — •Boris Bauermeister — Johannes Gutenberg-Universität: Institut für Physik, Mainz
The XENON Dark Matter search aims at directly detecting dark matter with a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber (TPC). The current experiment employs a total amount of 162 kg of liquid xenon and 242 photomultiplier tubes, with 62 kg target mass and 178 PMTs inside the TPC. XENON100 excludes a WIMP-nucleon cross-section bigger than σ = 7 × 10−45 cm2 (90 % CL) for a WIMP mass of mχ = 50 GeV/c2, and continues to collect data.
For the XENON experiment it is important to control the output signal from all photomultiplier tubes. The running operation requires a regular calibration, which is done once a week. For this, the process of taking dark matter is stopped while the photomultipliers’ calibration is done by an LED. Here we discuss methods to continuously monitor the PMTs and the detector performance during dark matter runs, where the signal in the dark matter region of interest is blinded. We describe the behavior of single photomultiplier tubes by analysing the spectral shape of each photomultiplier over time. This additional method of measurement ensures that each photomultiplier operates satisfactorily between calibrations, and identifies periods of inferior data quality.