Study of cosmogenic activation above ground for the DarkSide-20k experiment

The activation of materials due to exposure to cosmic rays may become an important background source for experiments investigating rare event phenomena. DarkSide-20k, currently under construction at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, is a direct detection experiment for galactic dark matter particles, using a two-phase liquid-argon Time Projection Chamber (TPC) filled with 49.7 tonnes (active mass) of Underground Argon (UAr) depleted in 39Ar. Despite the outstanding capability of discriminating / background in argon TPCs, this background must be considered because of induced dead time or accidental coincidences mimicking dark-matter signals and it is relevant for low-threshold electron-counting measurements. Here, the cosmogenic activity of relevant long-lived radioisotopes induced in the experiment has been estimated to set requirements and procedures during preparation of the experiment and to check that it is not dominant over primordial radioactivity; particular attention has been paid to the activation of the 120 t of UAr used in DarkSide-20k. Expected exposures above ground and production rates, either measured or calculated, have been considered in detail. From the simulated counting rates in the detector due to cosmogenic isotopes, it is concluded that activation in copper and stainless steel is not problematic. The activity of 39Ar induced during extraction, purification and transport on surface is evaluated to be 2.8% of the activity measured in UAr by DarkSide-50 experiment, which used the same underground source, and thus considered acceptable. Other isotopes in the UAr such as 37Ar and 3H are shown not to be relevant due to short half-life and assumed purification methods

Sensitivity projections for a dual-phase argon TPC optimized for light dark matter searches through the ionization channel

Dark matter lighter than 10  GeV/c2 encompasses a promising range of candidates. A conceptual design for a new detector, DarkSide-LowMass, is presented, based on the DarkSide-50 detector and progress toward DarkSide-20k, optimized for a low-threshold electron-counting measurement. Sensitivity to light dark matter is explored for various potential energy thresholds and background rates. These studies show that DarkSide-LowMass can achieve sensitivity to light dark matter down to the solar neutrino fog for GeV-scale masses and significant sensitivity down to 10  MeV/c2 considering the Migdal effect or interactions with electrons. Requirements for optimizing the detector’s sensitivity are explored, as are potential sensitivity gains from modeling and mitigating spurious electron backgrounds that may dominate the signal at the lowest energies

Latest results of dark matter detection with the DarkSide experiment

In this contribution the latest results of dark matter direct detection obtained by the DarkSide Collaboration are discussed. New limits on the scattering cross-section between dark matter particles and baryonic matter have been set. The results have been reached using the DarkSide-50 detector, a double-phase Time Projection Chamber (TPC) filled with 40Ar and installed at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS). In 2018, the DarkSide Collaboration has performed three different types of analysis. The so-called high-mass analysis into the range between ∼ 10 GeV and ∼ 1000 GeV is discussed under the hypothesis of scattering between dark matter and Ar nuclei. The low-mass analysis, performed using the same hypothesis, extends the limit down to ∼1.8 GeV. Through a different hypothesis, that predicts dark matter scattering off the electrons inside of the Ar atom, it has been possible to set limits for sub-GeV dark matter masses

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

Study of cosmogenic activation above ground for the DarkSide-20k experiment

The activation of materials due to exposure to cosmic rays may become an important background source for experiments investigating rare event phenomena. DarkSide-20k, currently under construction at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, is a direct detection experiment for galactic dark matter particles, using a two-phase liquid-argon Time Projection Chamber (TPC) filled with 49.7 tonnes (active mass) of Underground Argon (UAr) depleted in ³⁹Ar. Despite the outstanding capability of discriminating γ/β background in argon TPCs, this background must be considered because of induced dead time or accidental coincidences mimicking dark-matter signals and it is relevant for low-threshold electron-counting measurements. Here, the cosmogenic activity of relevant long-lived radioisotopes induced in the experiment has been estimated to set requirements and procedures during preparation of the experiment and to check that it is not dominant over primordial radioactivity; particular attention has been paid to the activation of the 120 t of UAr used in DarkSide-20k. Expected exposures above ground and production rates, either measured or calculated, have been considered in detail. From the simulated counting rates in the detector due to cosmogenic isotopes, it is concluded that activation in copper and stainless steel is not problematic. The activity of ³⁹Ar induced during extraction, purification and transport on surface is evaluated to be 2.8% of the activity measured in UAr by DarkSide-50 experiment, which used the same underground source, and thus considered acceptable. Other isotopes in the UAr such as ³⁷Ar and ³H are shown not to be relevant due to short half-life and assumed purification methods.ISSN:0927-650

Search for low-mass dark matter WIMPs with 12 ton-day exposure of DarkSide-50

International audienceWe report on the search for dark matter WIMPs in the mass range below 10 GeV/c$^2$, from the analysis of the entire dataset acquired with a low-radioactivity argon target by the DarkSide-50 experiment at LNGS. The new analysis benefits from more accurate calibration of the detector response, improved background model, and better determination of systematic uncertainties, allowing us to accurately model the background rate and spectra down to 0.06 keV$_{er}$. A 90% C.L. exclusion limit for the spin-independent cross section of 3 GeV/c$^2$ mass WIMP on nucleons is set at 6$\times$10$^{-43}$ cm$^2$, about a factor 10 better than the previous DarkSide-50 limit. This analysis extends the exclusion region for spin-independent dark matter interactions below the current experimental constraints in the $[1.2, 3.6]$ GeV/c$^2$ WIMP mass range