Scintillating Bubble Chambers for Rare Event Searches
E. Alfonso-Pita, Edward Behnke, M. Bressler, B. Broerman, Kenneth Clark, Jonathan Corbett, C. E. Dahl, K. Dering, A. De St. Croix, Daniel Durnford, P. Giampa, J. Hall, O. Harris, H. Hawley-Herrera, C. M. Jackson, Youngtak Ko, N. Lamb, Mathieu Laurin, Ilan Levine, W. H. Lippincott, Xingxin Liu, R. Neilson, M.-C. Piro, Shashank Priya, Daniel Pyda, Z. Sheng, G.G. Sweeney, E. Vázquez-Jáuregui, S. Westerdale, Thomas J. Whitis, Alexander Wright, Wei Zha, R. Zhang
Abstract
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is developing liquid-noble bubble chambers for the detection of sub-keV nuclear recoils. These detectors benefit from the electron recoil rejection inherent in moderately-superheated bubble chambers with the addition of energy reconstruction provided from the scintillation signal. The ability to measure low-energy nuclear recoils allows the search for GeV-scale dark matter and the measurement of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering on argon from MeV-scale reactor antineutrinos. The first physics-scale detector, SBC-LAr10, is in the commissioning phase at Fermilab, where extensive engineering and calibration studies will be performed. In parallel, a functionally identical low-background version, SBC-SNOLAB, is being built for a dark matter search underground at SNOLAB. SBC-SNOLAB, with a 10 kg-yr exposure, will have sensitivity to a dark matter–nucleon cross section of 2×10−42 cm2 at 1 GeV/c2 dark matter mass, and future detectors could reach the boundary of the argon neutrino fog with a tonne-yr exposure. In addition, the deployment of an SBC detector at a nuclear reactor could enable neutrino physics investigations including measurements of the weak mixing angle and searches for sterile neutrinos, the neutrino magnetic moment, and the light Z’ gauge boson.