Speaker
Description
XENONnT is the latest detector of the XENON program, designed for the direct detection of dark matter and currently operating at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. It is a dual-phase liquid xenon time projection chamber with an active target mass of 5.9 tonnes, characterized by extremely low background levels and a low energy threshold, making it well suited for rare-event searches.
In this talk, I will first introduce the detector, highlighting its key features and overall performance. I will then present the latest physics results, including the observation of coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering from $^8$B neutrinos, the ongoing search for WIMPs via nuclear recoils — the primary scientific goal of XENONnT — and very recent results on light dark matter. The latter are obtained using an ionization-only (S2-only) analysis, which extends the sensitivity to lower recoil energies compared to the traditional WIMP search. This approach allows us to place constraints on a broader class of light dark matter models, such as axion-like particles and dark photons.