Data-Driven Modeling of Electron Recoil Nucleation in PICO C\(_3\)F\(_8\) Bubble Chambers

• Published in: arXiv.org 2020-11
• Main Authors: Amole, C, Ardid, M, Arnquist, I J, Asner, D M, Baxter, D, Behnke, E, Bressler, M, Broerman, B, Cao, G, Chen, C J, Chen, S, Chowdhury, U, Clark, K, Collar, J I, Cooper, P S, Coutu, C B, Cowles, C, Crisler, M, Crowder, G, Cruz-Venegas, N A, Dahl, C E, Das, M, Fallows, S, Farine, J, Filgas, R, Fuentes, J, Girard, F, Giroux, G, Hackett, B, Hagen, A, Hall, J, Hardy, C, Harris, O, Hillier, T, Hoppe, E W, Jackson, C M, Jin, M, Klopfenstein, L, Kozynets, T, Krauss, C B, Laurin, M, Lawson, I, Leblanc, A, Levine, I, Licciardi, C, Lippincott, W H, Loer, B, Mamedov, F, Mitra, P, Moore, C, Nania, T, Neilson, R, Noble, A J, Oedekerk, P, Ortega, A, Pal, S, M -C Piro, Plante, A, Priya, S, Robinson, A E, Sahoo, S, Scallon, O, Seth, S, Sonnenschein, A, Starinski, N, Štekl, I, Sullivan, T, Tardif, F, Tiwari, D, Vázquez-Jáuregui, E, Wagner, J M, Walkowski, N, Weima, E, Wichoski, U, Wierman, K, Woodley, W, Yan, Y, Zacek, V, Zhang, J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bubble chambers; Coherent scattering; Coupling; Dark matter; Elastic scattering; Electrons; Empirical analysis; Nucleation; Nuclei (nuclear physics); Recoil; Solar neutrinos; Thresholds; Weakly interacting massive particles; Xenon
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1905.12522

The primary advantage of moderately superheated bubble chamber detectors is their simultaneous sensitivity to nuclear recoils from WIMP dark matter and insensitivity to electron recoil backgrounds. A comprehensive analysis of PICO gamma calibration data demonstrates for the first time that electron recoils in C\(_3\)F\(_8\) scale in accordance with a new nucleation mechanism, rather than one driven by a hot-spike as previously supposed. Using this semi-empirical model, bubble chamber nucleation thresholds may be tuned to be sensitive to lower energy nuclear recoils while maintaining excellent electron recoil rejection. The PICO-40L detector will exploit this model to achieve thermodynamic thresholds as low as 2.8 keV while being dominated by single-scatter events from coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering of solar neutrinos. In one year of operation, PICO-40L can improve existing leading limits from PICO on spin-dependent WIMP-proton coupling by nearly an order of magnitude for WIMP masses greater than 3 GeV c\(^{-2}\) and will have the ability to surpass all existing non-xenon bounds on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon coupling for WIMP masses from 3 to 40 GeV c\(^{-2}\).