The XENON1T Data Acquisition System

Featuring several kilometers of cables, dozens of analog electronics modules, crates of purpose-built specialty computers, and backed by a small server farm, the XENON1T data acquisition system (DAQ) was designed to put our data onto disks. The XENON Collaboration recently published a technical paper on our DAQ in JINST, of course also available on arXiv. […]

Light Dark Matter Search Results from XENON1T

XENON1T recently released a preprint with new world-leading constraints on light dark matter particles. The challenge of light dark matter The XENON1T detector aims find the signals of dark matter bouncing off xenon atoms. If such a collision happens, it produces two signals: a small light flash (S1), and a cloud of free electrons that […]

Modeling and statistical analysis of the XENON1T data

On May 31st 2018, XENON1T released the result of a search for dark matter interacting with xenon atoms using an exposure of 1 tonne-year. Papers presenting the scientific results are written to be brief, and communicate the most important information to the scientific community. Therefore, many details of the instrument, reconstruction of events and analysis […]

Constraining the spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon interaction with XENON1T

Since we don’t know how dark matter interacts with more familiar particles, we have to break up our search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in terms of their possible interactions with xenon nuclei. While many complex interactions are possible, we generally start with two simple cases: WIMP-nucleus interactions that don’t depend on the nuclear […]

XENON1T at Lake Louise

Physics meets winter sports at the Lake Louise Winter Institute, a particle physics conference held annually in the beautiful Canadian Rockies. On February 12, 2019, Evan Shockley from University of Chicago presented at the conference on behalf of the XENON collaboration. The talk focused on the latest, world-leading WIMP results, and included a status update […]

Outline the XENONnT Computing Scheme at the 2nd Rucio Community Workshop in Oslo

Oslo welcomed all 66 participants of the second Rucio Community Workshop with pleasant weather and a venue which offered an astonishing view about the capital of Norway. The opensource and contribution model of the Rucio data management tool captures more and more attention from numerous fields. Therefore, 21 communities reported this year about the implementation […]

What is Dark Matter made of?

Part of the mystery of Dark Matter is that we know it is there– just not what it is. In Discover magazine you can read about some of the top candidates: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-is-dark-matter-made-of-these-are-the-top-candidates. The primary candidate that XENON searches for is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP): Including our main spin-independent search, as well as further WIMP  interaction models. […]

Distillation campaign for XENONnT finished

The up-coming XENONnT experiment utilizes a total of 8.3 tonnes of xenon to search for the ever elusive dark matter particles. In addition to the existing 3.3 tonnes of ultra-pure xenon from XENON1T, another 5 tonnes of xenon were purchased by the XENON collaboration.  Before the new gas can be used for XENONnT, it needs […]

XENON at the 2019 Swiss-Austrian Physical Society Meeting

Five members of the University of Zurich group participated at the 2019 Swiss-Austrian Physical Society Meeting in Zurich, Switzerland. Adam Brown contributed with a poster on the XENONnT upgrades and status and Ricardo Peres on the software for the supernova early warning system: Giovanni Volta, Michelle Galloway and Chiara Capelli contributed with talks on the general XENON1T […]

The XENON1T Data Acquisition System

Featuring several kilometers of cables, dozens of analog electronics modules, crates of purpose-built specialty computers, and backed by a small server farm, the XENON1T data acquisition system (DAQ) was designed to put our data onto disks. The XENON Collaboration recently published a technical paper on our DAQ in JINST, of course also available on arXiv. […]