The quest for dark matter with liquid argon and beyond

• Davide Franco (APC)

Room: Room: B2.38 The field of direct dark matter search is experiencing a significant expansion in this decade, with many new experiments coming on board and exploring new avenues to increase sensitivity to Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the leading dark matter candidate. Liquid argon detectors play a major role in the search of WIMPs, especially if they take advantage of ultra-low background argon extracted from deep underground, depleted in cosmogenic contamination. Very recently, DarkSide-50 and DEAP-3600 have completed major milestones of their programs by publishing results from ~20 and ~10 tonne-days exposure campaigns, respectively. The outcomes of the dark matter searches are null results. The discrimination between events induced by natural radioactivity and nuclear recoils – the potential candidate dark matter events – is outstanding, confirming once more that a future generation of liquid argon detectors will also be able to operate completely free of background and in a real discovery mode. We will discuss the achieved results and the potential of dark matter search with next generation liquid argon detectors. In addition, we will discuss the possibility to exploit technology, specifically developed for liquid argon, for neutrino physics and medical applications.