Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Project

PICO has been a large Canadian success story, leading the field of spin dependent dark matter searches since its inception. PICO uses very low background bubble chamber with the intrinsic ability to suppress electron recoil events, thus eliminating many of the usual background encountered in dark matter searches. With the new, highly innovative buffer liquid free chambers PICO-40L and PICO-500 PICO will retain this leadership in the coming years. In the process of building, commissioning and operation of PICO-40L the PICO collaboration provides a supreme educational framework for future researchers at all levels. PICO, with the collaborators from the US and the Czech Republic provides research training and supervision for more than 10 undergraduates in Canada every year, nine graduate students and several postdoctoral fellows. These highly qualified trainees are directly in charge of important aspects of the construction, and operation of the detector hardware and the data acquisition and data analysis of PICO data. In the coming years PICO-40L will be operated in a blind physics run to improve the leading sensitivity by a factor of 10 within a year of starting the physics run. In addition to the 50kg scale PICO-40L, the collaboration is currently in the process of finishing the design and early aspects of the construction of the PICO-500 detector. This detector uses the lessons learned from the initial run of PICO-40L and presents the state of the art in low background bubble chamber design for dark matter searchers. PICO-500 will have an overall mass of 250kg of C3F8 active liquid. This detector uses the largest commercially available synthetic quartz bell jars as containment and will allow PICO to improve on the expected sensitivity reach by PICO-40L by another factor of 10. PICO-500 will be constructed underground in 2023 and completed in 2024 and will provide more opportunities for HQP training integrating innovative technological solutions, new data analysis techniques and collaborative approaches to finding solutions to common goals.