Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Acoustic Parameters As Discriminators Of Wall Events In Pico Dark Matter Search Data, Lucia Volkova

University Honors Program Senior Projects

Bubble chambers are one of several detector types that particle physicists use to search for the as-yet-undetected dark matter. The PICO collaboration – formed from the merger of the similar PICASSO and COUPP experiments – runs such a bubble detector using superheated fluorocarbons (with and without iodine). Bubbles that form along chamber walls exhibit different behavior than those which nucleate in the bulk of the target liquid due to shape distortions from the wall boundary; in previous analyses when searching for dark matter, these wall events have been cut from the data to control for the differing behavior using information …