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Miniclean Dark Matter Experiment, Juijen Wang

Physics & Astronomy ETDs

Particle Dark Matter is a hypothesis accounting for a number of observed astrophysical phenomena such as the anomalous galactic rotation curves. From these astronomical observation, about 23% of the universe appears to consist of dark matter. Among the possible candidates for dark matter, a plausible one is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). A particle with the required properties is beyond the standard model of particle physics. The MiniCLEAN experiment is single-phase liquid-argon detector instrumented with 92 photomultiplier tubes placed inside the cryogenic liquid with 4-pi coverage of a 500 kg (150 kg) target (fiducial) mass. For this experiment, PMT …