Physics reach of the XENON1T dark matter experiment

Abstract

The XENON1T experiment is currently in the commissioning phase at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy. In this article we study the experiment's expected sensitivity to the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon interaction cross section, based on Monte Carlo predictions of the electronic and nuclear recoil backgrounds.The total electronic recoil background in 1 tonne fiducial volume and (1, 12) keV electronic recoil equivalent energy region, before applying any selection to discriminate between electronic and nuclear recoils, is (1.80 ± 0.15) • 10 −4 (kg • day • keV) −1 , mainly due to the decay of 222 Rn daughters inside the xenon target. The nuclear recoil background in the corresponding nuclear recoil equivalent energy region (4, 50) keV, is composed of (0.6 ± 0.1) (t • y) −1 from radiogenic neutrons, (1.8 ± 0.3) • 10 −2 (t • y) −1 from coherent scattering of neutrinos, and less than 0.01 (t • y) −1 from muon-induced neutrons.The sensitivity of XENON1T is calculated with the Profile Likelihood Ratio method, after converting the deposited energy of electronic and nuclear recoils into the scintillation and ionization signals seen in the detector. We take into account the systematic uncertainties on the photon and electron emission model, and on the estimation of the backgrounds, treated as nuisance parameters. The main contribution comes from the relative scintillation efficiency L eff , which affects both the signal from WIMPs and the nuclear recoil backgrounds. After a 2 y measurement in 1 t fiducial volume, the sensitivity reaches a minimum cross section of 1.6 • 10 −47 cm 2 at m χ =50 GeV/c 2 .

Strange Quark Stars as a Probe of Dark Matter

“…, our present results are potentially useful in constraining various model parameters for DM-quark interactions (Gao et al 2013). (Akerib et al 2014), SuperCDMS(Ge) (Agnese et al 2014) as well as the future XENON1T (Aprile et al 2015) and the "neutrino discovery limit" (Billard et al 2014) are also included for comparison.…”

“…3, including the regions from DAMA-Libra (Bernabei et al 2008) and CDMS-Si (Agnese & Ahmed et al 2013) experiments and the limits from Super-CDMS (Agnese et al 2014), XENON100 (Aprile et al 2012) and LUX (Akerib et al 2014) groups. Also included are the expected sensitivity of future experiment XENON1T (Aprile et al 2015) and the "neutrino discovery limit" (Billard et al 2014) which sets limit on the sensitivity of the direct detection method.…”

“…Among these works, the host compact stars are generally assumed to be neutron stars (NSs), and thus numerous constraints on DM-nucleon interactions have been obtained. In particular, for bosonic DM which is favored by many theories beyond the standard model, if its self-interactions can be ignored, the formation of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) state could further facilitate the occurrence of DM collapsing into BH, and the resulting limits on the DMnucleon interactions become far beyond the terrestrial experiments (Bernabei et al 2008;Aprile et al 2012;Akerib et al 2014;Agnese & Ahmed et al 2013;Agnese et al 2014;Aprile et al 2015;Billard et al 2014), leading to a conclusion that the bosonic DM cannot be detected directly if the old compact stars are NSs.…”

Complementary Probes of Two-component Dark Matter

“…We show that H 1 can be probed at future direct detection experiments such as XENONnT/LZ and DARWIN, in the nuclear recoil energy event rate 6 . The sensitivity of the XENONnT experiment in the nuclear recoil energy event rate is as low as 10 −7 for the Xenon nucleon [86]. As shown in Figure 12, for fixed values of the couplings, the nuclear recoil event rate is higher for lower values of m H 1 and decreases with increasing H 1 mass.…”

The GAP-TPC

“…Current dark matter detectors using noble liquids have an effective target mass ranging from 100 kg to the ton-scale (e.g. LUX [1], Xenon-1T [2], DarkSide [3,4]). Hundreds of 2-3 inch photomultiplier tubes ‡ (PMTs) are used in these detectors for the accurate measurement of scintillation light from liquid argon (128 nm shifted to 420 nm) and liquid xenon (170 nm).…”