Data-Driven Modeling of Electron Recoil Nucleation in PICO C${}_3$F${}_8$ Bubble Chambers

Abstract

The primary advantage of moderately superheated bubble chamber detectors is their simultaneous sensitivity to nuclear recoils from WIMP dark matter and insensitivity to electron recoil backgrounds. A comprehensive analysis of PICO gamma calibration data demonstrates for the first time that electron recoils in C${}_3$F${}_8$ scale in accordance with a new nucleation mechanism, rather than one driven by a hot-spike as previously supposed. Using this semi-empirical model, bubble chamber nucleation thresholds may be tuned to be sensitive to lower energy nuclear recoils while maintaining excellent electron recoil rejection. The PICO-40L detector will exploit this model to achieve thermodynamic thresholds as low as 2.8 keV while being dominated by single-scatter events from coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering of solar neutrinos. In one year of operation, PICO-40L can improve existing leading limits from PICO on spin-dependent WIMP-proton coupling by nearly an order of magnitude for WIMP masses greater than 3 GeV c${}^{-2}$ and will have the ability to surpass all existing non-xenon bounds on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon coupling for WIMP masses from 3 to 40 GeV c${}^{-2}$.

arXiv comment18 pages, 12 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Physics reach of a low threshold scintillating argon bubble chamber in coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering reactor experiments
• Speeding Up Dark Matter With Solar Neutrinos
• Measurement of Charge and Light Yields for ${}^{127}$Xe L-Shell Electron Captures in Liquid Xenon
• A buffer-free concept bubble chamber for PICO dark matter searches
• Probing low-mass WIMP candidates of dark matter with tetrafluoroethane superheated liquid detectors
• Determining the bubble nucleation efficiency of low-energy nuclear recoils in superheated C${}_3$F${}_8$ dark matter detectors
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