Speaker
Description
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is developing liquid-noble bubble chambers sensitive to sub-keV nuclear recoils. These detectors extend the excellent electron-recoil insensitivity inherent in bubble chambers with the additional ability to reconstruct energy based on the scintillation signal for further background reduction. The targeted nuclear recoil threshold of 100 eV is made possible by the high level of superheat attainable in noble liquids while remaining electron-recoil insensitive. In order to verify this reduced threshold, the SBC collaboration is building two functionally-identical 10 kg liquid argon detectors. The first, SBC-LAr10, soon-to-be operational at Fermilab, will be used for engineering and calibration studies. The second detector, SBC-SNOLAB will probe the spin-independent dark matter-nucleon cross section down to 10$^{-43}$ cm$^2$ at 1 GeV$/c^2$ with a 10-kg-year exposure. An overview of scintillating liquid-noble bubble chambers along with the status and physics potential of SBC-SNOLAB will be presented.
