Speaker
Description
The DarkSide-20k experiment, under construction the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS), has been designed to lead the search for heavy WIMPs. While liquid argon provides powerful pulse-shape discrimination, the intrinsic cosmogenic Ar-39 in atmospheric Ar (~0.96 Bq/kg) makes multi-tonne Ar TPC experiments for rare-event searches unfeasible.
To address this, and following the successful experience of DarkSide-50, DarkSide-20k will use underground Ar (UAr), which is depleted in Ar-39 by a factor of at least 1400. The Global Argon Dark Matter Collaboration has launched a program to procure and process underground argon (UAr) at industrial scale.
In this talk, I will present the three infrastructures that program relies on and their status: (i) UAr extraction at the Urania plant (Colorado, USA); (ii) isotopic purification in the ARIA distillation column (Sardinia, Italy); and (iii) characterization using the DArT-in-ArDM setup. Particular emphasis will be placed on the latter facility, which recently started commissioning at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory in Spain. I will present the first results and the sensitivity studies performed with actual data.
| Main Contribution topic | Direct detection |
|---|---|
| Secondary contribution topic | Instrumentation for Dark Matter |