"Deep Underground Astroparticle Physics at SNOLAB"

Dr. Eric Vázquez Jáuregui
SNOLAB Underground Science Laboratory


SNOLAB is an underground international facility developed from the SNO experiment focused on dark matter and neutrino experiments. The laboratory is located near Sudbury Ontario, Canada in the Vale Creighton mine at a depth of 2 km to shield experiments from cosmic rays and operated under a class 2000 clean environment to mitigate against background contamination of experiments. Currently running experiments are COUPP-4kg, PICASSO, DAMIC and DEAP-1. COUPP-4kg is a bubble chamber for WIMP detection using a quartz jar filled with iodotri-fluoromethane (CF3I) sensitive to both spin-dependent and spin-independent WIMP interactions. COUPP-4kg recently completed the first physics run at SNOLAB achieving the best spin-dependent limit in the world. PICASSO is a dark matter experiment based on superheated liquid technique sensitive to spin-dependent interac- tions with 19F nuclei that recently published limits for recoil energy thresholds as low as 1.7 keV. DAMIC looks for dark matter with charge-coupled devices by detecting the silicon nuclear recoils produced due to their interaction with the WIMPs. The extremely low electronic readout noise on the CCDs allows one to set a very low threshold of approximately 40 eVee. DAMIC uses ten 250 microns thick CCDs, has an active mass of 10 grams, was deployed underground a few months ago and it is fully operational. DEAP-1 is a 7 kg liquid-argon prototype detector with 2 PMTs to demonstrate pulse-shape discrimination between electromagnetic events and nuclear recoils for spin-independent WIMP interactions. DEAP-1 completed data taking phase in 2012. Experiments under design and construction are SNO+, HALO, COUPP-60kg, DEAP-3600 and MiniCLEAN. SNO+ is a liquid scintillator detector to study low energy solar neutrinos, geo and reactor antineutrinos, to detect supernova neutrinos, and search for neutrinoless double beta decay by adding neodymium to the liquid scintillator. HALO is a fully operational neutrino detector for the observation of galactic supernovas using 80 tons of existing lead and 3He neutron detectors. COUPP-60kg is the next generation detector of the COUPP bubble chambers, moving from Fermilab to SNOLAB in 2012, it will start running by the end of March 2013. DEAP3600 and MiniCLEAN are single phase detectors of LAr or LNe for direct detection of dark matter using scintillation light and suppressing backgrounds by pulse shape discrimination. The SNOLAB facility construction is complete and competitive detectors are operating, and achieving world leading limits for dark matter searches, in addition, deployment of larger scale experiments is underway for dark matter and neutrino physics. SNOLAB has created a significant amount of space for active international research on Astroparticle Physics and the status of the experimental programme is presented in this talk.