Description:

Title: Results from the South Pole's DM-Ice17 Dark Matter Detector

Speaker: Antonia Hubbard, Northwestern University
 

Abstract: DM-Ice is a NaI(Tl) experiment searching for an annually-modulating dark matter signal. DM-Ice will determine if the 9 sigma signal observed by the DAMA experiment is of astrophysical origin. The first generation DM-Ice17 detector has successfully operated in the South Pole ice for six years, and the first phase of the full-scale detector is running at Y2L in South Korea. I present an analysis of the modulating muon background in DM-Ice17, including a long-lived phosphorescence near the dark matter region of interest. Analysis of coincident events between DM-Ice17 and IceCube indicates the strength of deploying scintillators within large Cherenkov detectors, and the successful operation of DM-Ice17 establishes the South Pole ice as a viable location for low-background experiments in the Southern Hemisphere.

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, HEP