Speaker
Description
DarkSide run since mid-2015 a 50-kg-active-mass dual-phase Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (TPC), filled with low radioactivity argon from an underground source and produced world-class results for both the low mass (M_WIMP<20 GeV/c^2) and high mass (M_WIMP>100 GeV/c^2) direct detection search for dark matter.
The next stage of the DarkSide program will be a new generation experiment involving a global collaboration from all the current Argon based experiments. DarkSide-20k is designed as a 20-tonne fiducial mass dual-phase Liquid Argon TPC with SiPM based cryogenic photosensors and is expected to be free of any instrumental background for exposure of >100 tonne x year. Like its predecessor, DarkSide-20k will be housed at the INFN Gran Sasso (LNGS) underground laboratory, and it is expected to attain a WIMP-nucleon cross-section exclusion sensitivity of 7.4 x 10^{-48} cm^2 for a WIMP mass of 1 TeV/c^2 in a 200 t yr run. DarkSide-20k will be installed inside a membrane cryostat containing more than 700 t of liquid Argon and be surrounded by an active neutron veto based on a Gd-loaded acrylic shell. The talk will give the latest updates of the ongoing R&D and prototype tests validating the initial design.
A subsequent objective, towards the end of the next decade, will be the construction of the ultimate detector, ARGO, with a 300 t fiducial mass to push the sensitivity to the neutrino floor region for high mass WIMPs.
