Münster 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 43: Astroparticle Physics II
HK 43.4: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 30. März 2017, 15:15–15:30, F 073
Internal backgrounds in the XENON100 experiment — •Dominick Cichon and Sebastian Lindemann for the XENON collaboration — Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (MPIK), Heidelberg, Germany
Astrophysical observations hint towards the existence of a non-baryonic component in the universe’s total mass content, called dark matter. In the search of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which are postulated to explain dark matter, several liquid xenon (LXe) dual-phase time projection chambers (TPCs), like XENON100, have already been employed to provide limits on possible WIMP interactions. XENON100’s successor experiment, XENON1T, has recently been commissioned and aims to be sensitive to spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross-sections down to σ ∼ 1.6 · 10−47 cm2 at a WIMP mass of 50 GeV/c2.
To achieve this goal, great care has to be taken to understand potential background sources and to limit them. Of all relevant sources, 222Rn and 85Kr belong to the largest contributors. One of the reasons for this is, that they dissolve in the LXe target medium. As a consequence, they cause background events which cannot be rejected using position reconstruction techniques. This talk outlines methods for identifying decays of 85Kr and those from the 222Rn chain in XENON100 data to estimate the expected amount of background events from both. In addition, the relevance of the techniques presented herein to the estimation of background in XENON1T is illustrated, as 222Rn and 85Kr belong to the most relevant sources for both experiments.