Designing and building a scintillating bubble chamber for WIMPs and reactor CEvNS

ORAL

Abstract

The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) is a rapidly developing new technology for sub-keV nuclear recoil detection. Demonstrations in liquid xenon at the few-gram scale have confirmed that this technique combines the event-by-event energy resolution of a liquid-noble scintillation detector with the world-leading electron-recoil discrimination capability of the bubble chamber, and in fact maintains that discrimination capability at much lower thresholds than traditional Freon-based bubble chambers. The promise of unambiguous identification of sub-keV nuclear recoils in a scalable detector makes this an ideal technology for both GeV-mass WIMP searches and CEvNS detection at reactor sites. We will present progress from the SBC Collaboration towards the construction of a 10-kg argon bubble chamber with SiPM-based scintillation readout to test the low-threshold performance of this technique in a physics-scale device.

*DOE DE-SC0012161 FNAL LDRD 2018-003 COFI (Colegio de Fisica Fundamental e Interdisciplinaria de las Americas)

Presenters

  • Rocco Coppejans

    • Northwestern University

Authors

  • Rocco Coppejans

    • Northwestern University
  • Matthew Bressler

    • Drexel University
  • C. Eric Dahl

    • Northwestern University