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.

References in corpus (4)

• Dark Matter Results from 225 Live Days of XENON100 Data
• The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment
• A simple high-sensitivity technique for purity analysis of xenon gas
• Study of a zirconium getter for purification of xenon gas

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Results from a search for dark matter in the complete LUX exposure
• DARWIN: towards the ultimate dark matter detector
• The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment
• Liquid noble gas detectors for low energy particle physics
• Dark compact objects: an extensive overview
• Radiogenic and Muon-Induced Backgrounds in the LUX Dark Matter Detector
• Galactic rotation curves, the baryon-to-dark-halo-mass relation and space-time scale invariance
• A Review of Basic Energy Reconstruction Techniques in Liquid Xenon and Argon Detectors for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics Using NEST
• Vector dark boson mediated feeble interaction between fermionic dark matter and strange quark matter in quark stars
• Strange Stars within Bosonic and Fermionic Admixed Dark Matter
• Constraining the mass of fermionic dark matter from its feeble interaction with hadronic matter via dark mediators in neutron stars
• High Voltage in Noble Liquids for High Energy Physics
• Reactor neutrino liquid xenon coherent elastic scattering experiment
• Scintillation decay-time constants for alpha particles and electrons in liquid xenon
• Evaluation of Coincidence Time Resolution in a liquid xenon detector with silicon photomultipliers
• Recovering the fundamental plane of galaxies by $f(R)$ gravity