The PICO-40L detector

Abstract

The PICO collaboration has designed and constructed a novel bubble chamber to search for evidence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, a leading dark matter candidate. The PICO-40L detector is the successor to PICO-60, and uses a fully redesigned system for pressurization of the active volume after a bubble nucleation event. Pressure in PICO-40L is transferred to the target fluid through a set of two nested synthetic quartz vessels connected by bellows below the active volume. This is in contrast to the design of earlier detectors in which the pressure was transferred through a buffer fluid atop the target fluid, within a single synthetic quartz vessel connected to a bellows above the active volume. Removing the buffer fluid removes the potential for backgrounds arising from the interface between the two fluids, and moving the bellows below the target fluid suppresses potential backgrounds from particulates originating from the bellows. The newly designed detector concept of PICO-40L is referred to as the Right-Side-Up (RSU) design and requires a dedicated thermal system to keep the lower region of the detector cold while the upper region is stably superheated. The main goal of PICO-40L is to establish the performance characteristics of the RSU detector concept, which will inform the operating configuration of the final generation PICO dark matter detector, PICO-500, which is currently under construction at SNOLAB. This paper reviews the design, installation, and performance of the PICO-40L detector.

arXiv comment39 pages, 21 figures