Speaker
Description
Over the past decade, liquid argon (LAr) has been established as a promising target for detecting Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), a leading dark matter candidate, due to its high particle discrimination efficiency, scalability, and intrinsic radiopurity. The Global Argon Dark Matter Collaboration (GADMC) was formed to lead a long-term research program utilizing LAr-based detectors for dark matter searches. Among its initiatives, DEAP-3600 has been operating at SNOLAB, Canada, since 2016. It is a single-phase LAr scintillation detector that utilizes a 3.3-tonne atmospheric LAr target viewed by 255 inward-facing photomultiplier tubes. DEAP-3600 has set the most stringent limits on WIMP-nucleon interactions in argon, particularly for WIMPs with masses greater than 30 GeV/c$^{2}$. Recent hardware upgrades were implemented to achieve a zero-background environment by mitigating degraded-energy alpha backgrounds. Key results from DEAP-3600 will be presented.
ARGO is being developed with a 400-tonne LAr target, fully instrumented with digital silicon photomultipliers surrounding an acrylic vessel. SNOLAB’s Cube Hall has been selected as the preferred site for this experiment. Studies of radiogenic neutron backgrounds and background mitigation strategies will be discussed.
