Speaker
Description
DARWIN is a planned 50 ton liquid xenon time-projection-chamber with the primary goal of searching directly for dark matter. It aims to measure nuclear recoils induced by Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) down to WIMP-nucleon cross sections of 1e-48 cm2 at which neutrinos become an irreducible background.
Thanks to its low energy threshold at a few keV, its ultra-low expected background levels, and unprecedented large target mass, further physics measurements become feasible. Those include the observation of pp-solar neutrinos, coherent neutrino-nucleus interactions, eventually supernova neutrinos, the search for axions or for rare processes like the neutrinoless double-beta decay of 136Xe. The talk will summarise the physics goals of DARWIN which are driving its design. In addition, an overview of the baseline detector setup and on-going R&D activities will be given.
