Description:

Dan Baxter -- Probing the Dark Sector: The Quest For A Background-Free Detector

Abstract: As data increasingly excludes the phase space of new physics, increasingly low background detectors are needed to observe the dark corners.  The PICO Collaboration attempts to do this by using the remarkable discriminating properties of the bubble chamber to search for hypothesized weak interactions between the dark sector and nucleons.  However, in order to successfully discover new physics, it is essential that such a detector understand and, ultimately, eliminate (or discriminate against) all possible sources of background that could contaminate the signal region.  The current backgrounds faced by PICO are discussed as is the plan for addressing them moving forward.
 

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