Publication Details

AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS

SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH

physics and astronomy

First Dark Matter Search Results from the XENON1T Experiment

Physical Review Letters, Volume 119, No. 18, Article 181301, Year 2017

We report the first dark matter search results from XENON1T, a ∼2000-kg-target-mass dual-phase (liquid-gas) xenon time projection chamber in operation at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy and the first ton-scale detector of this kind. The blinded search used 34.2 live days of data acquired between November 2016 and January 2017. Inside the (1042±12)-kg fiducial mass and in the [5,40] keVnr energy range of interest for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter searches, the electronic recoil background was (1.93±0.25)×10-4 events/(kg×day×keVee), the lowest ever achieved in such a dark matter detector. A profile likelihood analysis shows that the data are consistent with the background-only hypothesis. We derive the most stringent exclusion limits on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon interaction cross section for WIMP masses above 10 GeV/c2, with a minimum of 7.7×10-47 cm2 for 35-GeV/c2 WIMPs at 90% C.L.

Statistics
Citations: 100
Authors: 100
Affiliations: 22
Identifiers
Study Approach
Quantitative