Department Colloquium | The Search for Dark Matter with the XENON Experiment

Speaker: Elena Aprile (Columbia University)

Large volume liquid xenon detectors with excellent self-shielding and background discrimination are advancing at a fast pace and promise to impact the field of dark matter direct detection in a significant way. The XENON experiment aims at probing  WIMP-nucleon interactions with more than two order of magnitude sensitivity improvement over the most stringent limits reported to date. I will review the properties of liquid xenon which make it an excellent target-detector for particle dark matter and present the status and physics reach of the current phase of the program, the XENON100 experiment in final commissioning phase at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory.