|
Large Underground Xenon Experiment
The Large Underground Xenon experiment (LUX) aimed to directly detect weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter interactions with ordinary matter on Earth. Despite the wealth of (gravitational) evidence supporting the existence of non- baryonic dark matter in the Universe, dark matter particles in our galaxy have never been directly detected in an experiment. LUX utilized a 370 kg liquid xenon detection mass in a time-projection chamber (TPC) to identify individual particle interactions, searching for faint dark matter interactions with unprecedented sensitivity. The LUX experiment, which cost approximately $10 million to build, was located underground at the Sanford Underground Laboratory (SURF, formerly the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL) in the Homestake Mine (South Dakota) in Lead, South Dakota. The detector was located in the Davis campus, former site of the Nobel Prize-winning Homestake neutrino experiment led by Raymond Dav ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Weakly Interacting Massive Particle
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are hypothetical particles that are one of the proposed candidates for dark matter. There exists no formal definition of a WIMP, but broadly, a WIMP is a new elementary particle which interacts via gravity and any other force (or forces), potentially not part of the Standard Model itself, which is as weak as or weaker than the weak nuclear force, but also non-vanishing in its strength. Many WIMP candidates are expected to have been produced thermally in the early Universe, similarly to the particles of the Standard Model according to Big Bang cosmology, and usually will constitute cold dark matter. Obtaining the correct abundance of dark matter today via thermal production requires a self-annihilation cross section of \langle \sigma v \rangle \simeq 3 \times 10^ \mathrm^ \;\mathrm^, which is roughly what is expected for a new particle in the 100 GeV mass range that interacts via the electroweak force. Experimental efforts to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monte Carlo Method
Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be deterministic in principle. They are often used in physical and mathematical problems and are most useful when it is difficult or impossible to use other approaches. Monte Carlo methods are mainly used in three problem classes: optimization, numerical integration, and generating draws from a probability distribution. In physics-related problems, Monte Carlo methods are useful for simulating systems with many coupled degrees of freedom, such as fluids, disordered materials, strongly coupled solids, and cellular structures (see cellular Potts model, interacting particle systems, McKean–Vlasov processes, kinetic models of gases). Other examples include modeling phenomena with significant uncertainty in inputs such as the calculation of ris ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Brown is one of nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Admissions at Brown is among the most selective in the United States. In 2022, the university reported a first year acceptance rate of 5%. It is a member of the Ivy League. Brown was the first college in the United States to codify in its charter that admission and instruction of students was to be equal regardless of their religious affiliation. The university is home to the oldest applied mathematics program in the United States, the oldest engineering program in the Ivy League, and the third-oldest medical program in New England. The university was one of the early doctoral-granting U.S. institutions in the late 19th century, adding masters ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Gaitskell
Richard Jeremy Gaitskell (born May 2, 1965) is a physicist and professor at Brown University and a leading scientist in the search for particle dark matter."Inside the hunt for dark matter from Popular Science. Published October 2013 He is co-founder, a principal investigator, and co-spokesperson of the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, which announced world-leading"First results from the LUX dark matter experiment at SURF," Phys. Rev. LettPublished March 2014. first results on October 30, 2013. He is also a leading investigator in the new LUX-Zeplin (LZ) dark matter experiment. Career Gaitskell was educated at Dulwich College and received his BA and MA degrees from Oxford University in 1985. He was a scholar at St John's College and is the grandson of labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell. In 1985-1989 Gaitskell worked for the investment bank Morgan Grenfell in London, including a spell as an Assistant Director of Morgan Grenfell International. In 1993 he received his Ph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Double Chooz
Double Chooz was a short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment in Chooz, France. Its goal was to measure or set a limit on the ''θ''13 mixing angle, a neutrino oscillation parameter responsible for changing electron neutrinos into other neutrinos. The experiment uses reactors of the Chooz Nuclear Power Plant as a neutrino source and measures the flux of neutrinos they receive. To accomplish this, Double Chooz has a set of two detectors situated 400 meters and 1050 meters from the reactors. Double Chooz was a successor to the Chooz experiment; one of its detectors occupies the same site as its predecessor. Until January 2015 all data has been collected using only the far detector. The near detector was completed in September 2014, after construction delays, and started taking data at the beginning of 2015. Both detectors stopped taking data in late December 2017. Detector design Double Chooz used two identical gadolinium-doped liquid scintillator detectors placed in vicinity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Enriched Xenon Observatory
The Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO) is a particle physics experiment searching for neutrinoless double beta decay of xenon-136 at WIPP near Carlsbad, New Mexico, U.S. Neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) detection would prove the Majorana nature of neutrinos and impact the neutrino mass values and ordering. These are important open topics in particle physics. EXO currently has a 200-kilogram xenon liquid time projection chamber (EXO-200) with R&D efforts on a ton-scale experiment (nEXO). Xenon double beta decay was detected and limits have been set for 0νββ. Overview EXO measures the rate of neutrinoless decay events above the expected background of similar signals, to find or limit the double beta decay half-life, which relates to the effective neutrino mass using nuclear matrix elements. A limit on effective neutrino mass below 0.01 eV would determine the neutrino mass order. The effective neutrino mass is dependent on the lightest neutrino mass in such a w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kamland
The Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) is an electron antineutrino detector at the Kamioka Observatory, an underground neutrino detection facility in Hida, Gifu, Japan. The device is situated in a drift mine shaft in the old KamiokaNDE cavity in the Japanese Alps. The site is surrounded by 53 Japanese commercial nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors produce electron antineutrinos (\bar_e) during the decay of radioactive fission products in the nuclear fuel. Like the intensity of light from a light bulb or a distant star, the isotropically-emitted \bar_e flux decreases at 1/R2 per increasing distance R from the reactor. The device is sensitive up to an estimated 25% of antineutrinos from nuclear reactors that exceed the threshold energy of 1.8 megaelectronvolts (MeV) and thus produces a signal in the detector. If neutrinos have mass, they may oscillate into flavors that an experiment may not detect, leading to a further dimming, or "disappearance," of the e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IceCube
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory (or simply IceCube) is a neutrino observatory constructed at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The project is a recognized CERN experiment (RE10). Its thousands of sensors are located under the Antarctic ice, distributed over a cubic kilometre. Similar to its predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), IceCube consists of spherical optical sensors called Digital Optical Modules (DOMs), each with a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and a single-board data acquisition computer which sends digital data to the counting house on the surface above the array. IceCube was completed on 18 December 2010. DOMs are deployed on strings of 60 modules each at depths between 1,450 and 2,450 meters into holes melted in the ice using a hot water drill. IceCube is designed to look for point sources of neutrinos in the teraelectronvolt (TeV) range to explore the highest-energy astrophysical processes. In November 2013 it was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) was a neutrino observatory located 2100 m underground in Vale's Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The detector was designed to detect solar neutrinos through their interactions with a large tank of heavy water. The detector was turned on in May 1999, and was turned off on 28 November 2006. The SNO collaboration was active for several years after that analyzing the data taken. The director of the experiment, Art McDonald, was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015 for the experiment's contribution to the discovery of neutrino oscillation. The underground laboratory has been enlarged into a permanent facility and now operates multiple experiments as SNOLAB. The SNO equipment itself was being refurbished for use in the SNO+ experiment. Experimental motivation The first measurements of the number of solar neutrinos reaching the Earth were taken in the 1960s, and all experiments prior to SNO observed a third to a ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Super-Kamiokande
Super-Kamiokande (abbreviation of Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detection Experiment, also abbreviated to Super-K or SK; ja, スーパーカミオカンデ) is a neutrino observatory located under Mount Ikeno near the city of Hida, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. It is located underground in the Mozumi Mine in Hida's Kamioka area. The observatory was designed to detect high-energy neutrinos, to search for proton decay, study solar and atmospheric neutrinos, and keep watch for supernovae in the Milky Way Galaxy. It consists of a cylindrical stainless steel tank about in height and diameter holding 50,000 metric tons (55,000 US tons) of ultrapure water. Mounted on an inside superstructure are about 13,000 photomultiplier tubes that detect light from Cherenkov radiation. A neutrino interaction with the electrons or nuclei of water can produce an electron or positron that moves faster than the speed of light in water, which is slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. This creates a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ZEPLIN-III
The ZEPLIN-III dark matter experiment attempted to detect galactic WIMPs using a 12 kg liquid xenon target. It operated from 2006 to 2011 at the Boulby Underground Laboratory in Loftus, North Yorkshire. This was the last in a series of xenon-based experiments in the ZEPLIN programme pursued originally by the UK Dark Matter Collaboration (UKDMC). The ZEPLIN-III project was led by Imperial College London and also included the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Edinburgh in the UK, as well as LIP-Coimbra in Portugal and ITEP-Moscow in Russia. It ruled out cross-sections for elastic scattering of WIMPs off nucleons above 3.9 × 10−8 pb (3.9 × 10−44 cm2) from the two science runs conducted at Boulby (83 days in 2008 and 319 days in 2010/11). Direct dark matter search experiments look for extremely rare and very weak collisions expected to occur between the cold dark matter particles that are believed to permeate our galaxy and the nuclei of atoms in the a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
XENON Dark Matter Search Experiment
Xenon is a chemical element with the symbol Xe and atomic number 54. It is a dense, colorless, odorless noble gas found in Earth's atmosphere in trace amounts. Although generally unreactive, it can undergo a few chemical reactions such as the formation of xenon hexafluoroplatinate, the first noble gas compound to be synthesized. Xenon is used in flash lamps and arc lamps, and as a general anesthetic. The first excimer laser design used a xenon dimer molecule (Xe2) as the lasing medium, and the earliest laser designs used xenon flash lamps as pumps. Xenon is also used to search for hypothetical weakly interacting massive particles and as a propellant for ion thrusters in spacecraft. Naturally occurring xenon consists of seven stable isotopes and two long-lived radioactive isotopes. More than 40 unstable xenon isotopes undergo radioactive decay, and the isotope ratios of xenon are an important tool for studying the early history of the Solar System. Radioactive xenon-135 is pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
