https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20159504020
PICASSO, COUPP and PICO - search for dark matter with bubble chambers
1 Department of Physics, Queen’s University, Kingston, K7L 3N6, Canada
2 Universitat Politècnica de València, IGIC, 46730 Gandia, Spain
3 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington 99354, USA
4 Department of Physics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA
5 Department of Physics, Indiana University South Bend, South Bend, Indiana 46634, USA
6 Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology Division, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, 700064, India
7 Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois 60510, USA
8 Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A7, Canada
9 Enrico Fermi Institute, KICP and Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
10 Département de Physique, Université de Montréal, Montréal, H3C 3J7, Canada
11 Department of Physics, Laurentian University, Sudbury, P3E 2C6, Canada
12 Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, 12800, Czech Republic
13 Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, T6G 2G7, Canada
14 SNOLAB, Lively, Ontario, P3Y 1N2, Canada
15 Center for Intelligent Material Systems and Structures, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA
16 Department of Physics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA
a e-mail: robert.filgas@utef.cvut.cz
Published online: 29 May 2015
The PICASSO and COUPP collaborations use superheated liquid detectors to search for cold dark matter through the direct detection of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). These experiments, located in the underground laboratory of SNOLAB, Canada, detect phase transitions triggered by nuclear recoils in the keV range induced by interactions with WIMPs. We present details of the construction and operation of these detectors as well as the results, obtained by several years of observations. We also introduce PICO, a joint effort of the two collaborations to build a second generation ton-scale bubble chamber with 250 liters of active liquid.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2015
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
