New dark matter search results from XENON1T

by Sander Breuer (Nikhef)

Thursday 14 Jun 2018, 12:30 → 14:00 US/Pacific

Other Institutes

The XENON dark matter project aims at finding direct evidence for the scattering of weakly interacting massive dark matter particles (WIMPs) with a liquid-xenon target in an ultra low-background detector. XENON1T, located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, is the first multi-ton experiment using a dual-phase liquid xenon Time Projection Chamber. The detector and its subsystems were commissioned in 2016 and lead to our first-results publication in 2017 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06655). Now I will present our new result using 278.8 days of data and a fiducial mass of 1.3 t. This corresponds to an exposure of 1 tonne-year, resulting in a 10 times better sensitivity than our first result. In this talk I will explain the working of our detector and its sub-parts, show how we start with over 150 million events and end up with the final selection of a few hundred, and explain the statistical interpretation of this new result.