arXiv · 1905.12522
Data-Driven Modeling of Electron Recoil Nucleation in PICO C$_3$F$_8$ Bubble Chambers
Abstract
The primary advantage of moderately superheated bubble chamber detectors is their simultaneous sensitivity to nuclear recoils from WIMP dark matter and insensitivity to electron recoil backgrounds. A comprehensive analysis of PICO gamma calibration data demonstrates for the first time that electron recoils in C$_3$F$_8$ scale in accordance with a new nucleation mechanism, rather than one driven by a hot-spike as previously supposed. Using this semi-empirical model, bubble chamber nucleation thresholds may be tuned to be sensitive to lower energy nuclear recoils while maintaining excellent electron recoil rejection. The PICO-40L detector will exploit this model to achieve thermodynamic thresholds as low as 2.8 keV while being dominated by single-scatter events from coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering of solar neutrinos. In one year of operation, PICO-40L can improve existing leading limits from PICO on spin-dependent WIMP-proton coupling by nearly an order of magnitude for WIMP masses greater than 3 GeV c$^{-2}$ and will have the ability to surpass all existing non-xenon bounds on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon coupling for WIMP masses from 3 to 40 GeV c$^{-2}$.
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C. Amole, M. Ardid, I. J. Arnquist, D. M. Asner, D. Baxter, E. Behnke, M. Bressler, B. Broerman, G. Cao, C. J. Chen, S. Chen, U. Chowdhury, K. Clark, J. I. Collar, P. S. Cooper, C. B. Coutu, C. Cowles, M. Crisler, G. Crowder, N. A. Cruz-Venegas, C. E. Dahl, M. Das, S. Fallows, J. Farine, R. Filgas, J. Fuentes, F. Girard, G. Giroux, B. Hackett, A. Hagen, J. Hall, C. Hardy, O. Harris, T. Hillier, E. W. Hoppe, C. M. Jackson, M. Jin, L. Klopfenstein, T. Kozynets, C. B. Krauss, M. Laurin, I. Lawson, A. Leblanc, I. Levine, C. Licciardi, W. H. Lippincott, B. Loer, F. Mamedov, P. Mitra, C. Moore, T. Nania, R. Neilson, A. J. Noble, P. Oedekerk, A. Ortega, S. Pal, M. -C. Piro, A. Plante, S. Priya, A. E. Robinson, S. Sahoo, O. Scallon, S. Seth, A. Sonnenschein, N. Starinski, I. Štekl, T. Sullivan, F. Tardif, D. Tiwari, E. Vázquez-Jáuregui, J. M. Wagner, N. Walkowski, E. Weima, U. Wichoski, K. Wierman, W. Woodley, Y. Yan, V. Zacek, J. Zhang. 2019-05-29. Data-Driven Modeling of Electron Recoil Nucleation in PICO C$_3$F$_8$ Bubble Chambers. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.100.082006
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