"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.