Guillaume Plante
(Columbia University)
The XENON100 experiment, installed underground at the Laboratori
Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, aims at detecting dark matter weakly
interacting massive particles (WIMPs) scattering off nuclei within its
62 kg liquid xenon (LXe) target by simultaneously measuring the
scintillation and ionization signals produced by nuclear recoils. These
two signals allow the three-dimensional localization of events with
millimeter precision and the ability to fiducialize the target volume,
yielding an inner core with a very low background. In this talk, I will
present the recent XENON100 results obtained from 225 live days of data
acquired in 2011-2012 and briefly discuss past, as well as ongoing,
dedicated measurements performed to understand the response of LXe to
low-energy nuclear and electronic recoils. Finally, I will talk about
the next phase in the XENON program, the XENON1T experiment, currently
under construction, and with an expected sensitivity to WIMP-nucleon
interactions nearly 2 orders of magnitude better than XENON100