Technical Results from the Surface Run of the LUX Dark Matter Experiment
Abstract
We present the results of the three-month above-ground commissioning run of the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility located in Lead, South Dakota, USA. LUX is a 370 kg liquid xenon detector that will search for cold dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). The commissioning run, conducted with the detector immersed in a water tank, validated the integration of the various sub-systems in preparation of the underground deployment. Using the data collected, we report excellent light collection properties, achieving 8.4 photoelectrons per keV for 662 keV electron recoils without an applied electric field, measured in the center of the WIMP target. We also find good energy and position resolution in relatively high-energy interactions from a variety of internal and external sources. Finally, we have used the commissioning data to tune the optical properties of our simulation and report updated sensitivity projections for spin-independent WIMP-nucleon scattering.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1210.4569,
title = {Technical Results from the Surface Run of the LUX Dark Matter Experiment},
author = {LUX Collaboration and D. S. Akerib and X. Bai and E. Bernard and A. Bernstein and A. Bradley and D. Byram and S. B. Cahn and M. C. Carmona-Benitez and J. J. Chapman and T. Coffey and A. Dobi and E. Dragowsky and E. Druszkiewicz and B. Edwards and C. H. Faham and S. Fiorucci and R. J. Gaitskell and K. R. Gibson and M. Gilchriese and C. Hall and M. Hanhardt and M. Ihm and R. G. Jacobsen and L. Kastens and K. Kazkaz and R. Knoche and N. Larsen and C. Lee and K. T. Lesko and A. Lindote and M. I. Lopes and A. Lyashenko and D. C. Malling and R. Mannino and D. N. McKinsey and D. Mei and J. Mock and M. Moongweluwan and M. Morii and H. Nelson and F. Neves and J. A. Nikkel and M. Pangilinan and K. Pech and P. Phelps and A. Rodionov and T. Shutt and C. Silva and W. Skulski and V. N. Solovov and P. Sorensen and T. Stiegler and M. Sweany and M. Szydagis and D. Taylor and M. Tripathi and S. Uvarov and J. R. Verbus and L. de Viveiros and N. Walsh and R. Webb and J. T. White and M. Wlasenko and F. L. H. Wolfs and M. Woods and C. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.4569},
year = {2013}
}