High voltage electrode development and the LZ experiment's WIMP search
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Approximately 15% of the matter density in the universe is composed of Standard Model particles, while the other 85% is composed of an enigmatic "dark" matter whose fundamental properties are unknown. In recent decades, there has been substantial interest in performing a direct detection of scattering between dark matter and Standard Model particles, but currently no such signature has been verifiably observed. The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment was built to perform such a direct detection of dark matter using a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber (TPC), which can observe both light and charge signals from an interaction in the xenon. The dual-phase xenon TPC technology is critically dependent on maintaining strong drift and extraction fields in order to observe the charge signal. These fields are established by a set of four stainless steel wire mesh high voltage electrode grids that span the full width of the TPC. During operation, these grids achieve wire surface fields well above 15 kV/cm. These high fields can produce spurious charge signals and signals from real radioactive decays with atypical light-to-charge ratios, both of which can lead to low-energy backgrounds in LZ science data. As a result, substantial effort in the design, construction, validation, and operation of these grids was required to ensure that the LZ detector could be used to pursue world-leading dark matter searches. This work presents a detailed characterization of these efforts, from grid design all the way through first science run data with LZ. This work also presents two analyses performed within the first six months of datataking: the first science run searching for WIMP dark matter, and an analysis of radiogenic backgrounds from the high voltage grids. While the former analysis represents an immediate world-leading sensitivity to WIMP dark matter between about 10 GeV/c^2 and 10 TeV/c^2, the latter analysis lays a new foundation for the background model needed to search for dark matter at much lower masses, down to approximately 1 GeV/c^2.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Linehan, Ryan Edward |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Shutt, Thomas (Thomas Alan) |
| Thesis advisor | Shutt, Thomas (Thomas Alan) |
| Thesis advisor | Akerib, Daniel S |
| Thesis advisor | Burchat, P. (Patricia) |
| Thesis advisor | Friedland, Alexander |
| Degree committee member | Akerib, Daniel S |
| Degree committee member | Burchat, P. (Patricia) |
| Degree committee member | Friedland, Alexander |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Physics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Ryan Edward Linehan. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Physics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/gd265np9466 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Ryan Edward Linehan
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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