Updates on the DEAP-3600 experiment and steps towards the ARGO experiment

TL;DR

The paper reports recent advances in the DEAP-3600 liquid argon dark matter detector, including hardware upgrades and data analysis techniques, and discusses the development of the next-generation ARGO detector with enhanced sensitivity.

Contribution

It presents new understanding of liquid argon properties, improved position reconstruction, background mitigation strategies, and details on the design of the upcoming ARGO detector.

Findings

Enhanced pulse-shape discrimination and position reconstruction in DEAP-3600.

Hardware upgrades successfully mitigated residual alpha backgrounds.

Simulation studies inform the design of the ARGO detector.

Abstract

The DEAP-3600 experiment, with an approximately 3.3 tonne liquid argon (LAr) target, is currently the world's largest single-phase LAr dark matter detector. It is located 2 km underground at SNOLAB, Canada, one of the most radiopure underground laboratories. With excellent pulse-shape discrimination against low-energy beta decays and precise position reconstruction, DEAP-3600 has set the most stringent WIMP-nucleon spin-independent cross-section exclusion limits for masses above 30 GeV/c$^{2}$ on argon and provided leading sensitivity to superheavy, multi-scattering dark matter candidate. Here we report the recent advances in understanding LAr properties and position reconstruction techniques using DEAP-3600 data along with hardware upgrades to mitigate residual challenging $\alpha$-backgrounds for WIMP search. As a part of Global Argon Dark Matter Collaboration (GADMC), the next-generation ARGO detector, featuring a 300-tonne fiducial LAr mass, is under development to significantly enhance sensitivity to rare dark matter interactions. Simulation-based studies of radiogenic neutron backgrounds and their mitigation strategies provide essential input to this design and will be described here.