Speaker
Description
The DarkSide-50 experiment employs a dual-phase liquid argon time projection chamber inside a system of two active veto detectors to directly search for WIMP dark matter. DarkSide-50 has recently performed a background-free search using 70 live days of data with low radioactivity argon extracted from underground, setting the strongest limit to date on the WIMP-nucleon elastic cross section with an argon target. The future DarkSide-20k experiment will employ 23 tons of low-radioactivity underground argon as an active target, with further intrinsic radioactivity reduction of underground argon via isotope separation. The scintillation light will be collected with large arrays of radio pure silicon photomultipliers, and the unique pulse shape properties of argon will be utilized to allow discrimination against electronic recoil backgrounds. This pulse-shape discrimination, in combination with the active veto system to tag neutron backgrounds, will enable DarkSide-20k to search for dark matter particles beyond the sensitivities of current experiments while remaining background free. This talk will describe the current status of the DarkSide-50 search and the planned configuration of DarkSide-20k.
