Development of Spherical Proportional Counter for light WIMP search within NEWS-G collaboration

Abstract

The Spherical gaseous detector (or Spherical Proportional Counter, SPC) has a broad range of applications. In this work, we will focus on the light WIMP Dark Matter particle search, that is, below a few GeV. The NEWS-G collaboration operates a 60 cm diameter detector at Modane underground laboratory (LSM). Running the detector at 3 b of Neon gas, some competitive limits have been set down to 0.5 GeV WIMP mass thanks to an energy threshold of around 100 eV. To reach better performances, the next generation of SPC (140cm), NEWS-G SNO, is under construction. We will focus here on the fabrication method, the different low energy calibration methods using 37Ar, neutron and UV laser, on the cleaning methods to remove the surface contamination and mitigation of 210Pb bulk contamination.

References in corpus (8)

• Dark Matter Candidates from Particle Physics and Methods of Detection
• First results from the NEWS-G direct dark matter search experiment at the LSM
• A novel large-volume Spherical Detector with Proportional Amplification read-out
• Precision laser-based measurements of the single electron response of SPCs for the NEWS-G light dark matter search experiment
• Identification of ${}^{210}$Pb and ${}^{210}$Po in the bulk of copper samples with a low-background alpha particle counter
• A multiball read-out for the spherical proportional counter
• Study of a spherical Xenon gas TPC for neutrinoless double beta detection
• Background optimization for a new spherical gas detector for very light WIMP detection