- March 21, 2022, 2:00 pm US/Central
- Matthew Bressler, Drexel
Abstract: PICO and SBC are working towards the next bubble chamber based dark matter searches. My research focuses on prototyping and calibrations in a small PICO C3F8 bubble chamber at Drexel University, analysis of low-threshold calibration data in a small xenon bubble chamber, and construction and commissioning of a larger SBC argon bubble chamber at Fermilab. Over the past five years, the Drexel Bubble Chamber (DBC) has provided data related to PICO’s detector development and calibration efforts, notably multiple experiments which help us to better understand gamma (electron recoil) backgrounds to the dark matter search (nuclear recoils). Another development in bubble chamber technology has been the operation of a xenon bubble chamber in which bubble nucleation can be accompanied by scintillation light in the noble liquid. The success of the xenon bubble chamber has led to the development of the next generation of scintillating bubble chambers, and we put our efforts towards operation of a 10 kg argon bubble chamber with the goal of operating at sub-keV nuclear recoil detection thresholds while vetoing higher-energy nuclear recoils from background neutrons and maintaining intrinsic bubble-nucleation-insensitivity to gammas. I will report on the results of the DBC and xenon bubble chamber calibration experiments and the status and next steps of the argon bubble chamber commissioning, calibration, and dark matter search