Date of Award
1-1-2024
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College/School/Department
Department of Physics
Dissertation/Thesis Chair
Cecilia Levy
Committee Members
Matthew Szydagis, Carolyn MacDonald, Ethan Brown, Jonathan Petruccelli
Keywords
Dark Matter, Direct Detection, Liquid Xenon, TPC active volume wall, Wall Background, WIMPs
Subject Categories
Physics
Abstract
Dark matter is still one of the greatest unsolved enigmas of modern science. There is a wealth of evidence for dark matter, yet the detection and the fundamental properties of dark matter particles, which make up about 86% of the mass of our Universe, are still elusive. Direct detection experiments probe the interactions between the dark matter particles and some target nuclei inside particle detectors in a low background environment. LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a direct detection dark matter experiment located at the 4850 ft. level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, United States. The LZ experiment employs a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber (TPC), in combination with integrated veto systems, to detect Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), a highly motivated dark matter candidate. With an exposure of 60 live days and a fiducial mass of 5.5 t, LZ has set world-leading limits on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross-sections for WIMP masses above 9 GeV/c^{2}. The first dark matter search results are consistent with the background-only hypothesis, achieving a minimum of 9.2 \times 10^{-48} cm^{2} for a WIMP mass of 36 GeV/c^{2} in the sensitivity limit curve.
Recommended Citation
Parveen, Nishat, "Modeling The Wall Background In The Lux-Zeplin (Lz) Dark Matter Experiment" (2024). Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). 3357.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/legacy-etd/3357
