Speaker
Marcello Messina
(Columbia University)
Description
The XENON Project aims at directly detecting dark matter particles through their interaction in a liquid xenon target. The XENON100 detector, a double phase Time Projection Chamber employing 161 kg of liquid xenon, started the first science run at INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories (LNGS), Italy, in 2010. It provided limits on the spin-independent and spin-dependent interaction cross sections of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with xenon nuclei, and on the couplings of solar axions and galactic xions-like particles. A new data taking run is currently ongoing, mainly focused on additional calibration for the low energy response of the detector. While still taking data with XENON100 the collaboration is also committed to build the third generation detector, XENON1T. This new detector, currently under construction at LNGS and starting data taking by the end of 2015, will exploit a liquid xenon target of tonnes scale, reaching a sensitivity to spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section of the order of 10-47 cm^2 in a 2 yr data taking.
