Searching high and low for dark matter, neutrinos, and more with liquid xenon detectors

by Scott Haselschwardt (LBNL)

Monday 4 Mar 2024, 11:00 → 12:00 America/Los_Angeles

51/3-305 - Kavli 3rd Floor (SLAC)

Understanding the particle nature of dark matter is one of the most pressing tasks of modern science, motivating numerous theoretical dark matter candidates and experimental efforts to detect them. In the past two decades, substantial progress in dark matter direct detection experimental sensitivity has been made, most notably by experiments utilizing liquid xenon as their detection medium. This progression has led in particular to the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, which uses an active volume containing 7-tonnes of liquid xenon.

Here I will provide an overview of the LZ experiment and it’s status. I will then discuss two exciting directions for the field’s future: (1) an LZ upgrade to enable searches for sub-GeV dark matter through the addition of hydrogen to the xenon target and (2) the design and construction of the “XLZD” experiment, a next-generation detector to definitively search for weakly-interacting dark matter candidates. I will describe critical R&D opportunities at SLAC to enable both of these directions and discuss novel analysis channels in these detectors. Thus I hope to motivate the notion of these detectors as “observatories” for the multitude of physics studies they enable.

 

Slides     Zoom recording   (the seminar begins at 00:22:40)

 

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