The development of two-phase xenon dark matter detectors.

摘要

The nature of dark matter remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern physics. The existence of dark matter has been inferred from its gravitational interactions and is strongly supported on theoretical grounds. A primary candidate for the dark matter is the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), which may be an undiscovered particle from the supersymmetric sector. This dissertation describes the research and development in two-phase liquid xenon dark matter detector technology and the results from the full-scale detector XENON10. Two-phase liquid xenon detectors use position sensitivity and simultaneous measurement of light and charge to remove background electron recoil events. The development of this technology has been rapid -- the work in this dissertation began in the summer of 2003 when the potential of this technology had yet to be determined, and in early 2008 the XENON10 collaboration published the then world-best upper limit on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section. The first measurement of the charge based discrimination performance at low energies was achieved in a prototype in early 2005. This prototype also determined the performance of discrimination via scintillation pulse shape. Although pulse shape discrimination was shown to be far weaker than that from charge yield, the combined use of the two methods demonstrated a discrimination power beyond that achieved by either method alone. Alternative detector technologies were also explored. Electron multiplication on wire grids was demonstrated in a two-phase prototype and its discrimination power potential is shown to be near that of the typical electroluminescence charge-readout technique. This could allow for the removal of some or all of the photo-multipliers in the detector, which would greately reduce radioactive backgrounds. The use of a wavelength shifter was tested in an attempt to improve light collection and was shown to impede charge collection. The magnitude of fluctuations in recombination in electron recoils, which are an important component in charge resolution, was also measured. The final chapter describes the XENON10 detector, its operation at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, the analysis of the data, and the results of the WIMP search.