Speaker
Description
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) Collaboration is developing noble liquid bubble chambers for the detection of sub-keV nuclear recoils, enabling both high-exposure GeV-scale dark matter searches and CEvNS measurements using reactor neutrinos. Nuclear recoils (NRs) in these chambers produce both a single bubble and a coincident flash of scintillation light, while electron-recoil (ER) backgrounds produce scintillation only. The physics reach of these chambers depends critically on what NR bubble nucleation threshold can be achieved while remaining ER-blind. This threshold will be explored with SBC’s first physics-scale device: a 10-kg LAr bubble chamber, now under construction, that will operate in the MINOS tunnel at Fermilab. I will give an update on the status of this chamber and describe the calibration strategies we will use to measure the chamber’s sensitivity to nuclear recoils with energies down to 100-eV.
