The Scintillating Bubble Chamber at SNOLAB

by Benjamin Broerman (Queen's University)

Tuesday Sep 23, 2025, 9:30 AM → 10:30 AM Canada/Eastern

Surface Facility/1-121 - Fraser Duncan Auditorium (SNOLAB)

The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is developing liquid-noble bubble chambers sensitive to sub-keV nuclear recoils to search for dark matter with masses from approximately 1-10 GeV/c2. These detectors extend the excellent electron-recoil insensitivity inherent in Freon-based bubble chambers with the additional ability to veto higher energy neutron backgrounds based on the scintillation signal. 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, now taking early data 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 cm2 at 1 GeV/c2 with a 10-kg-year exposure. An overview of scintillating liquid-noble bubble chambers, early silicon photomultiplier data from Fermilab, along with the status and physics potential of SBC-SNOLAB will be presented.