Data-driven modeling of electron recoil nucleation in PICO C3F8 bubble chambers

Abstract

[EN] The primary advantage of moderately superheated bubble chamber detectors is their simultaneous sensitivity to nuclear recoils from weakly interacting massive particle (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 C3F8 scale in accordance with a new nucleation mechanism, rather than one driven by a hot spike as previously supposed. Using this semiempirical 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-401, 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).The PICO Collaboration wishes to thank SNOLAB and its staff for support through underground space, logistical and technical services. SNOLAB operations are supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Province of Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, with underground access provided by Vale at the Creighton mine site. We wish to acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) for funding. We acknowledge the support from National Science Foundation (NSF) (Grants No. 0919526, No. 1506337, No. 1242637, No. 1205987, and No. 1806722). We acknowledge that this work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics (under Award No. DE-SC-0012161), by DGAPA-UNAM (PAPIIT No. IA100118) and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT, M¿exico, Grants No. 252167 and No. A1-S-8960), by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Government of India, under the Centre for AstroParticle Physics II project (CAPP-II) at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), European Regional Development Fund¿Project ¿Engineering Applications of Microworld Physics¿ (Project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/ 16_019/0000766), and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Red Consolider MultiDark, Grant No. FPA2017-90566-REDC). This work is partially supported by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through NSF Grant No. 1125897, and an endowment from the Kavli Foundation and its founder Fred Kavli. We also wish to acknowledge the support from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05- 76RL01830. We also thank Compute Canada [75] and the Center for Advanced Computing, ACENET, Calcul Qu¿ebec, Compute Ontario, and WestGrid for computational support.Amole, C.; Ardid Ramírez, M.; Arnquist, I.; Asner, DM.; Baxter, D.; Behnke, E.; Bressler, M.... (2019). Data-driven modeling of electron recoil nucleation in PICO C3F8 bubble chambers. Physical Review D: covering particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology. 100(8):1-18. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.082006S1181008Amole, C., Ardid, M., Arnquist, I. J., Asner, D. M., Baxter, D., Behnke, E., … Chen, C. J. (2019). Dark matter search results from the complete exposure of the PICO-60 C3F8 bubble chamber. 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