Joran Angevaare, PhD at Nikhef, will defend his thesis Wednesday 7 June 2023 at 16.00 at the University of Amsterdam.
“First WIMP results of XENONnT and its signal reconstruction”
As physicists, we are trying to solve the puzzle that is our Universe. Yet, ordinary, baryonic matter, only accounts for 16% of the total mass of the Universe. The remaining 84% should be some form of matter that has never been observed. This mysterious matter component is called Dark Matter. XENONnT is one of the experiments at the forefront of the search for Dark Matter, and located at a deep underground lab in Italy. It searches, primarily, for a Dark Matter candidate called the weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) by monitoring a volume of liquid xenon. Other experiments like the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) at SNOLAB in Canada, use semiconductors (germanium and silicon) as target materials and may also detect WIMPs, especially if they are relatively light. In this thesis we describe how XENONnT aims to detect WIMPs if they interact with liquid xenon, and how well XENONnT or SuperCDMS may be able to reconstruct the properties of Dark Matter if we find it. In this case, and by combining the results of XENONnT and SuperCDMS, the properties of Dark Matter will be more precisely reconstructed. We further describe the data acquisition and the signal reconstruction of XENONnT. The final chapter of this thesis discusses the latest Dark Matter search result of XENONnT, which sets new stringent limits to the cross section of the WIMP scattering off ordinary matter.
“First WIMP results of XENONnT and its signal reconstruction” (pdf)
The PhD defense will take place on Wednesday 7 June 2023, at 16.00 in the Agnietenkapel, Oudezijds Voorburgwal 229 – 231, 1012 EZ Amsterdam.
The PhD defense will be broadcasted online.
More information on the website of the UvA.
Supervisors: prof. dr. M.P. Decowski and prof. dr. A.P. Colijn
contact: Joran Angevaare