Particle and Astroparticle Physics Seminar

Update on the Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration and SBC-LAr10

Hector Hawley Herrara

Queen's University

The main objective of the Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is to detect 1-10 GeV dark matter by combining the electron recoil suppression of conventional bubble chambers with the scintillation properties of liquid noble elements. The use of noble elements provides two benefits. First, there is the potential to reduce the energy threshold to 100 eV by efficiently converting most of the energy deposited by electron recoils to light to suppress bubble creation. Second, there is the ability to collect event-by-event energy information from the scintillation. To test this technology, SBC is building its first prototype at Fermilab called SBC-LAr10. This prototype includes the scintillation system using liquid argon doped on the order of 100 ppm of Xe as the scintillator, and the light collection devices are 32 Hamamatsu VUV4 silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). Then, for the dark matter search SBC will build an identical chamber in SNOLAB. This talk includes a summary of the SiPM characterization done at Queen's University using a Peltier-based cooling device and dark count data.