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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Toward a neutrino-limited dark matter search with crystalline xenon

Hao Chen1,*, Ryan Gibbons1,2, S. J. Haselschwardt1, Scott Kravitz3, Qing Xia1, and Peter Sorensen1,†

  • 1Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Austin, 2515 Speedway, Austin, Texas 78712, USA

  • *maque@lbl.gov
  • †pfsorensen@lbl.gov
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Phys. Rev. D 109, L071102 – Published 29 April, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.L071102

Abstract

Experiments searching for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter are now detecting background events from solar neutrino-electron scattering. However, the dominant radioactive background in state-of-the-art experiments such as LZ and XENONnT is beta decays from radon contamination. In spite of careful detector material screening, radon progenitor atoms are ubiquitous and long-lived, and radon is extremely soluble in liquid xenon. We propose a change of phase and demonstrate that crystalline xenon offers more than a factor ×500 exclusion against radon ingress, compared with the liquid state. This level of radon exclusion would allow crystallized versions of existing experiments to probe spin-independent cross sections near 10−47  cm2 in roughly 11 years, as opposed to the 35 years required otherwise.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. D 109, L071102– Published 29 April, 2024
  • Received 22 December 2023
  • Accepted 4 April 2024
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