Speaker
Description
The Sodium-iodide with Active Background REjection (SABRE) experiment is designed to search for the annual modulation of the dark matter interaction rate with NaI(Tl) crystals. The experiment will also be able to perform a conclusive and model-independent test of the DAMA/LIBRA annual modulation signal. This signal is compatible with the expected dark matter galactic distribution, but it is in contrast with observations from different-target dark matter experiments under the standard WIMP hypothesis.
SABRE will perform a high sensitivity dark matter search using NaI(Tl) crystals with unprecedented radio-purity operated inside a liquid scintillator veto for active background rejection. The properties of such crystals make the experiment also ideal for the detection of faint x-ray emissions from charged particles, which are a by-product of certain quantum mechanics theories. The most popular of such theories are the Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) and the Diosi-Penrose (DP) models, which address foundational quantum mechanics problems like: “why the wave function of a quantum system collapses to a single state as a consequence of the measurement of one of its observables?” and “how classical macroscopic behaviours emerge from the quantum world?”.
The first phase of the experiment, the SABRE Proof-of-Principle (PoP), is underway. A single 3.5 kg crystal detector is hosted in a two-ton liquid scintillator veto system at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. The goal of this phase is to measure the crystal background, test the active background rejection system.
This talk will illustrate the characteristics of the SABRE experiment and its expected sensitivity at testing both dark matter theories and quantum mechanics models. The status of the SABRE PoP and any preliminary result will also be presented.