XENON

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Kr Destillation Column arrived
July 23: The dedicated instrument to purify the xenon used for the XENON100 experiment has just arrived and is put into operation now. This device enables us to remove Kr-85, the only radioactive isotope remaining in xenon, to the ppt level.

Limits on Spin dependent WIMP couplings from XENON10

July 15: The paper presenting the limits on spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon cross-sections from the XENON10 experiment is accepted for publication by Phys. Rev. Lett. The preprint can be found here.

XENON100 Poster
May 20: This poster, presented at the APS spring meeting in April 2008, gives a good overview about the XENON program and the basics of the XENON100 experiment.

Second XENON100 Collaboration Meeting

April 15-16: The members of the XENON100 collaboration met at LNGS for the second general collaboration meeting. This was a good opportunity to welcome the Dark Matter group of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) who joined our collaboration in April.

The first conference day was a "kick off" meeting devoted to the next step in the XENON program, a detector with 1 ton fiducial mass.

XENON100 Detector is Underground

February 25: The XENON100 detector is installed in its shield underground at LNGS (Italy). The following pictures show some details of the assembly (click on pictures to enlarge them):

Top PMT array
Bottom PMT array
TPC detail (meshes)
Assembled TPC
Xe100 Underground

This talk given at the 8th UCLA Symposium on Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe gives an overview of the current status of the XENON100 experiment.

The 6 Most Important Experiments in the World

November 14: The Discover Magazine rankes XENON100 among the "6 most important experiments in the world". XENON100 will become operational in spring 2008, searching for the yet undiscovered Dark Matter particle.

The other 5 experiments in the article are The Blue Brain Project to simulate the human brain, The Earthtime Projectto reveal Earth's history, The Planted Forests Project, The Census of Marine Life, and Artificial Life.

First XENON100 Collaboration Meeting @ LNGS

On October 20-21, 2007, the first meeting of the new XENON100 collaboration with participation of almost all collaboration members was held at LNGS in Italy.

The aim of the XENON100 project is to build a 10 times larger XENON detector within the next months to gain a dramatic increase in Dark Matter sensitivity.

XENON announced new best limits on Dark Matter

In April 2007, the XENON10 collaboration announced the result from the first run at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (Italy): A blind analysis of the data, taken in almost 60 days with a fiducial mass of 5.4 kg (after cuts), excludes previously unexplored parameter space for cold Dark Matter.

The new result (solid red curve in figure) significantly lowers the limits on weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) and further constrains predictions of some supersymmetric models (orange shaded region).
The paper on the (spin-independent) XENON10 Dark Matter limits is published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 021303 (2008). The preprint can be found here: arXiv:0706.0039.
Results
Exclusion plot with the new result.

XENON in the news

2007-11-14: Discover Magazine: The 6 most important Experiments in the World
2007-08-23: Rice physicists go deep for 'dark matter' - Rice News
2007-08-12: 'Researchers use high-tech machines to detect mysterious dark matter'
Associated Press article, published in USA Today and Washington Post (AP)
2007-08-01: Physics Today, August 2007 issue, pp.16-18
2007-07-19: Nature News Feature