29 July 2019 to 2 August 2019
Northeastern University
US/Eastern timezone

The Most Recent Results of the LUX Dark Matter Experiment

30 Jul 2019, 16:17
17m
West Village G 102 (Northeastern University)

West Village G 102

Northeastern University

Oral Presentation Dark Matter Dark Matter

Speaker

Prof. Matthew Szydagis (University at Albany)

Description

LUX (Large Underground Xenon) was a dark matter experiment using a two-phase Xe Time Projection Chamber housed and operated at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota from 2012 to late 2016. It previously published three world-leading limits on the spin-independent cross-section for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter via direct detection, with a fiducial mass of 100 to 150 kg. In this talk, I will report on the recent analysis efforts the LUX collaboration is making to fully utilize data from the 4 years of detector operation, even since Fall 2016 when the detector was dismantled. The additional analyses with the existing science and calibration data sets are probing different dark matter models and detection techniques, as well as searching for other rare-event phenomena. This work pushes the exploitation of LUX data at both low and high energies, with some searches focusing on energy ranges that have not yet been studied. In pursuing several new results recently, LUX is also being used to understand the potential detector performance of future dual-phase detectors for WIMP-nucleon scattering, and to demonstrate new analysis methods that can be used to improve our discrimination of backgrounds within next-generation experiments.

Primary author

Prof. Matthew Szydagis (University at Albany)

Presentation materials