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Wired - XENON100

August 6, 2009: An article about the hunt for Dark Matter and XENON100 appeared in the UK version of the Wired magazine.

XENON Collaboration Meeting

April 20/21, 2009: Due to the earthquake, the XENON100 collaboration had a smaller collaboration meeting with reduced attendance in Rome. We were happy to meet our new collaborators for the future XENON100+: They are from University of Münster (Germany), Subatech (France), Waseda University (Japan), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China).

Strong Earthquake in Abruzzo Region

April 2009: On April 6th, a strong eartquake hit the Abruzzo region where the XENON100 detector is located in the LNGS underground lab, causing the death of several hundred people and dramatic damages to many buildings.

However, we were lucky and no XENON member suffered serious injury. The detector is also fine and we are able to operate it almost as normal.

Church in Paganica after earthquake

Kr Destillation Column in Operation

September 21, 2008: The dedicated destillation column to purify the xenon used for XENON100 is in operation underground at LNGS. Currently, we process all xenon through the instrument in order to remove Kr-85, the only radioactive isotope in xenon, to the ppt level. Column1 Column2 Column3

Limits on Spin dependent WIMP couplings from XENON10

September 5, 2008: The paper presenting the limits on spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon cross-sections from the XENON10 experiment is now published in Physical Review Letters: J. Angle et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 0901301 (2008). The preprint can be found here.

XENON100 Picture Gallery

August 28, 2008: Some more pictures of the XENON100 and the people working on the detector can be found in the XENON100 picture gallery.

XENON100 Poster

May 20, 2008: 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. 		Poster

Second XENON100 Collaboration Meeting

April 15-16, 2008: 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, 2008: 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
Top PMT array 		Bottom PMT array
Bottom PMT array 		Mesh Structure
TPC detail (meshes) 		Xe100 TPC
Assembled TPC 		Xe100 Detector installed underground
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, 2007: 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. Collaboration

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

updated: 08/06/2009 by Marc Schumann