Download or read book Operation and Calibration of Right-Side-Up Bubble Chambers at ~keV Thresholds written by Matthew John Bressler and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As dark matter continues to evade direct detection, we continue to develop new technologies and revive old ones to search for its rare interactions with ordinary matter. Bubble chambers are one such technology, now used for dark matter searches for over a decade by COUPP and its descendant PICO. The Drexel Bubble Chamber (DBC) was PICO's first freon-filled bubble chamber without a buffer layer of water. Following its successful operation as a proof-of-concept prototype, gamma calibration data was collected in the DBC in two separate experiments to directly test new models for electron recoil bubble nucleation developed by PICO based on data from defunct bubble chambers. These calibrations show that we now understand bubble nucleation by electron recoils in pure and contaminated C3F8 enough to make accurate predictions of the gamma backgrounds in future dark matter searches and to explain the past seemingly-anomalous calibrations. With slightly different dark matter search goals, the Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration has begun building bubble chambers containing liquid noble target fluids, which allow for the collection of scintillation light accompanying bubble nucleation for energy reconstruction. A xenon-filled prototype bubble chamber shows the ability to operate at nuclear recoil detection thresholds near 1 keV, while maintaining insensitivity to bubble nucleation by gammas. We are now building two 10 kg argon bubble chambers with the goal of operating at sub-keV nuclear recoil thresholds to attain sensitivity to ~1 GeV/c^2 dark matter. The hydraulic and electronic systems for the calibration chamber are operational and we are preparing to test the cooling system before beginning full bubble chamber operation. After a brief introduction and motivation on the topic of dark matter, I will give a technical description of the DBC and its operational success, then show results of the gamma calibrations in pure C3F8 and C3F8 doped with O(10 ppm) xenon. The second half of this thesis focuses on scintillating bubble chambers, beginning with new results from the xenon bubble chamber, then moving to a literature review on the topic of argon bubble chambers, and finally the progress on SBC's argon bubble chambers and sensitivity projections for SBC dark matter searches.