We correct an overestimation of the production rate of
137
Xe in the DARWIN detector operated at LNGS. This formerly dominant intrinsic background source is now at a level similar to the irreducible ...background from solar
8
B neutrinos, thus unproblematic at the LNGS depth. The projected half-life sensitivity for the neutrinoless double beta decay (
0
ν
β
β
) of
136
Xe improves by
22
%
compared to the previously reported number and is now
T
1
/
2
0
ν
=
3.0
×
10
27
yr
(90% C.L.) after 10 years of DARWIN operation.
Abstract
A novel online distillation technique was developed for the XENON1T dark matter experiment to reduce intrinsic background components more volatile than xenon, such as krypton or argon, while ...the detector was operating. The method is based on a continuous purification of the gaseous volume of the detector system using the XENON1T cryogenic distillation column. A krypton-in-xenon concentration of (360 ± 60) ppq was achieved. It is the lowest concentration measured in the fiducial volume of an operating dark matter detector to date. A model was developed and fitted to the data to describe the krypton evolution in the liquid and gas volumes of the detector system for several operation modes over the time span of 550 days, including the commissioning and science runs of XENON1T. The online distillation was also successfully applied to remove 37Ar after its injection for a low-energy calibration in XENON1T. This makes the usage of 37Ar as a regular calibration source possible in the future. The online distillation can be applied to next-generation liquid xenon time projection chamber experiments to remove krypton prior to, or during, any science run. The model developed here allows further optimization of the distillation strategy for future large-scale detectors.
We report on a blinded analysis of low-energy electronic recoil data from the first science run of the XENONnT dark matter experiment. Novel subsystems and the increased 5.9 ton liquid xenon target ...reduced the background in the (1, 30) keV search region to (15.8±1.3) events/(ton×year×keV), the lowest ever achieved in a dark matter detector and ∼5 times lower than in XENON1T. With an exposure of 1.16 ton-years, we observe no excess above background and set stringent new limits on solar axions, an enhanced neutrino magnetic moment, and bosonic dark matter.
We report on the first search for nuclear recoils from dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) with the XENONnT experiment, which is based on a two-phase time ...projection chamber with a sensitive liquid xenon mass of 5.9 ton. During the (1.09±0.03) ton yr exposure used for this search, the intrinsic ^{85}Kr and ^{222}Rn concentrations in the liquid target are reduced to unprecedentedly low levels, giving an electronic recoil background rate of (15.8±1.3) events/ton yr keV in the region of interest. A blind analysis of nuclear recoil events with energies between 3.3 and 60.5 keV finds no significant excess. This leads to a minimum upper limit on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section of 2.58×10^{-47} cm^{2} for a WIMP mass of 28 GeV/c^{2} at 90% confidence level. Limits for spin-dependent interactions are also provided. Both the limit and the sensitivity for the full range of WIMP masses analyzed here improve on previous results obtained with the XENON1T experiment for the same exposure.
ABSTRACT IceTop is an air-shower array located on the Antarctic ice sheet at the geographic South Pole. IceTop can detect an astrophysical flux of neutrons from Galactic sources as an excess of ...cosmic-ray air showers arriving from the source direction. Neutrons are undeflected by the Galactic magnetic field and can typically travel 10 (E/PeV) pc before decay. Two searches are performed using 4 yr of the IceTop data set to look for a statistically significant excess of events with energies above 10 PeV (1016 eV) arriving within a small solid angle. The all-sky search method covers from −90° to approximately −50° in declination. No significant excess is found. A targeted search is also performed, looking for significant correlation with candidate sources in different target sets. This search uses a higher-energy cut (100 PeV) since most target objects lie beyond 1 kpc. The target sets include pulsars with confirmed TeV energy photon fluxes and high-mass X-ray binaries. No significant correlation is found for any target set. Flux upper limits are determined for both searches, which can constrain Galactic neutron sources and production scenarios.
Since the recent detection of an astrophysical flux of high-energy neutrinos, the question of its origin has not yet fully been answered. Much of what is known about this flux comes from a small ...event sample of high neutrino purity, good energy resolution, but large angular uncertainties. In searches for point-like sources, on the other hand, the best performance is given by using large statistics and good angular reconstructions. Track-like muon events produced in neutrino interactions satisfy these requirements. We present here the results of searches for point-like sources with neutrinos using data acquired by the IceCube detector over 7 yr from 2008 to 2015. The discovery potential of the analysis in the northern sky is now significantly below = 10−12 TeV cm−2 s−1, on average 38% lower than the sensitivity of the previously published analysis of 4 yr exposure. No significant clustering of neutrinos above background expectation was observed, and implications for prominent neutrino source candidates are discussed.
We present a measurement of the atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters using three years of data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The DeepCore infill array in the center of IceCube enables ...the detection and reconstruction of neutrinos produced by the interaction of cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere at energies as low as ∼5 GeV. That energy threshold permits measurements of muon neutrino disappearance, over a range of baselines up to the diameter of the Earth, probing the same range of L/E_{ν} as long-baseline experiments but with substantially higher-energy neutrinos. This analysis uses neutrinos from the full sky with reconstructed energies from 5.6 to 56 GeV. We measure Δm_{32}^{2}=2.31_{-0.13}^{+0.11}×10^{-3} eV^{2} and sin^{2}θ_{23}=0.51_{-0.09}^{+0.07}, assuming normal neutrino mass ordering. These results are consistent with, and of similar precision to, those from accelerator- and reactor-based experiments.
Delayed single- and few-electron emissions plague dual-phase time projection chambers, limiting their potential to search for light-mass dark matter. This paper examines the origins of these events ...in the XENON1T experiment. Characterization of the intensity of delayed electron backgrounds shows that the resulting emissions are correlated, in time and position, with high-energy events and can effectively be vetoed. In this work we extend previous S2-only analyses down to a single electron. From this analysis, after removing the correlated backgrounds, we observe rates <30 events/(electron×kg×day) in the region of interest spanning 1 to 5 electrons. We derive 90% confidence upper limits for dark matter-electron scattering, first direct limits on the electric dipole, magnetic dipole, and anapole interactions, and bosonic dark matter models, where we exclude new parameter space for dark photons and solar dark photons.
The IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole has measured the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum as a function of zenith angle and energy in the approximate 320 GeV to 20 TeV range, to search for ...the oscillation signatures of light sterile neutrinos. No evidence for anomalous ν_{μ} or νover ¯_{μ} disappearance is observed in either of two independently developed analyses, each using one year of atmospheric neutrino data. New exclusion limits are placed on the parameter space of the 3+1 model, in which muon antineutrinos experience a strong Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein-resonant oscillation. The exclusion limits extend to sin^{2}2θ_{24}≤0.02 at Δm^{2}∼0.3 eV^{2} at the 90% confidence level. The allowed region from global analysis of appearance experiments, including LSND and MiniBooNE, is excluded at approximately the 99% confidence level for the global best-fit value of |U_{e4}|^{2}.
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