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 CF 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 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.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.1905.12522,
title = {Data-Driven Modeling of Electron Recoil Nucleation in PICO C$_3$F$_8$ Bubble Chambers},
author = {C. Amole and M. Ardid and I. J. Arnquist and D. M. Asner and D. Baxter and E. Behnke and M. Bressler and B. Broerman and G. Cao and C. J. Chen and S. Chen and U. Chowdhury and K. Clark and J. I. Collar and P. S. Cooper and C. B. Coutu and C. Cowles and M. Crisler and G. Crowder and N. A. Cruz-Venegas and C. E. Dahl and M. Das and S. Fallows and J. Farine and R. Filgas and J. Fuentes and F. Girard and G. Giroux and B. Hackett and A. Hagen and J. Hall and C. Hardy and O. Harris and T. Hillier and E. W. Hoppe and C. M. Jackson and M. Jin and L. Klopfenstein and T. Kozynets and C. B. Krauss and M. Laurin and I. Lawson and A. Leblanc and I. Levine and C. Licciardi and W. H. Lippincott and B. Loer and F. Mamedov and P. Mitra and C. Moore and T. Nania and R. Neilson and A. J. Noble and P. Oedekerk and A. Ortega and S. Pal and M. -C. Piro and A. Plante and S. Priya and A. E. Robinson and S. Sahoo and O. Scallon and S. Seth and A. Sonnenschein and N. Starinski and I. Štekl and T. Sullivan and F. Tardif and D. Tiwari and E. Vázquez-Jáuregui and J. M. Wagner and N. Walkowski and E. Weima and U. Wichoski and K. Wierman and W. Woodley and Y. Yan and V. Zacek and J. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.12522},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
18 pages, 12 figures