First Dark Matter Search Results from the XENON1T Experiment

Abstract

We report the first dark matter search results from XENON1T, a $\sim$2000-kg-target-mass dual-phase (liquid-gas) xenon time projection chamber in operation at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy and the first ton-scale detector of this kind. The blinded search used 34.2 live days of data acquired between November 2016 and January 2017. Inside the (1042$\pm$12) kg fiducial mass and in the [5, 40] ${\mathrm{keV}}_{\mathrm{nr}}$ energy range of interest for WIMP dark matter searches, the electronic recoil background was $(1.93\pm 0.25)\times 10^{-4}$ events/(kg $\times$ day $\times {\mathrm{keV}}_{\mathrm{ee}}$), the lowest ever achieved in a dark matter detector. A profile likelihood analysis shows that the data is consistent with the background-only hypothesis. We derive the most stringent exclusion limits on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon interaction cross section for WIMP masses above 10 GeV/c${}^2$, with a minimum of 7.7 $\times 10^{-47}$ cm${}^2$ for 35-GeV/c${}^2$ WIMPs at 90% confidence level.

6 pages, 4 figures, v2 data upload Fig 2/4, v3 as accepted by PRL with textual clarifications, v4 data upload Fig 1