Evan Pease (UCB/Yale) "New results from the 332-live-day exposure of the LUX dark matter experiment"

Abstract:
Earlier this year the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment completed its final dark matter search from 4850 feet below ground in the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. Between September 2014 and May 2016 the LUX detector amassed 332 live days of exposure in its hunt for dark matter, primarily in search of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), a favored dark matter candidate. Our analysis of this exposure yields improved and world-leading constraints on the interaction of WIMPs for a wide range of possible masses, placing a 90%-confidence exclusion limit on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross-section greater than 2.2 x 10^-46 cm^2 at 50 GeV/c^2 WIMP mass. This result includes a factor of 4 improvement over the previous LUX sensitivity to WIMP masses 100 GeV/c^2 and above. This presentation will include a discussion of changes in detector performance from the previous LUX search in 2013, a description of the “salted” data analysis approach, and a look at the frequent in-situ calibrations of the complex time-varying detector response during 20 months of operation.