Dark matter detection with liquid argon

Abstract

Liquid argon has very desirable timing characteristics for the detection of interactions of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as Dark Matter candidates. Nuclear recoil interactions emit light with time constants of the order of nanoseconds, whereas gammas and betas have time constants of the order of microseconds, enabling discrimination of such backgrounds by factors greater than 108. The global community using liquid argon for the detection of WIMPs includes a series of experiments ranging from Dark-Side-50, ArDM, DEAP-3600, DarkSide-20k and in the future ARGO and a detector studying low-mass WIMPs. Characteristics and status of this series of detectors are presented.

Keywords

• Dark matter
• Liquid argon
• Underground science