Behnke E, Collar J I, Cooper P S, Crum K, Crisler M, Hu M, Levine I, Nakazawa D, Nguyen H, Odom B, Ramberg E, Rasmussen J, Riley N, Sonnenschein A, Szydagis M, Tschirhart R
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Indiana University South Bend, South Bend, IN 46634, USA.
Science. 2008 Feb 15;319(5865):933-6. doi: 10.1126/science.1149999.
Bubble chambers were the dominant technology used for particle detection in accelerator experiments for several decades, eventually falling into disuse with the advent of other techniques. We report here on a new application for these devices. We operated an ultraclean, room-temperature bubble chamber containing 1.5 kilograms of superheated CF3I, a target maximally sensitive to spin-dependent and -independent weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) couplings. An extreme intrinsic insensitivity to the backgrounds that commonly limit direct searches for dark matter was measured in this device under operating conditions leading to the detection of low-energy nuclear recoils like those expected from WIMPs. Improved limits on the spin-dependent WIMP-proton scattering cross section were extracted during our experiments, excluding this type of coupling as a possible explanation for a recent claim of particle dark-matter detection.
几十年来，气泡室一直是加速器实验中用于粒子探测的主要技术，最终随着其他技术的出现而不再使用。我们在此报告这些装置的一项新应用。我们操作了一个超洁净的室温气泡室，其中装有1.5千克过热的CF3I，该靶对与自旋相关和与自旋无关的弱相互作用大质量粒子（WIMP）耦合具有最大灵敏度。在该装置处于导致探测到低能核反冲（如WIMP预期的那样）的运行条件下，测量了其对通常限制暗物质直接探测的背景的极端固有不敏感性。在我们的实验中提取了对自旋相关的WIMP-质子散射截面的改进限制，排除了这种耦合作为最近关于粒子暗物质探测声明的一种可能解释。
