Search for dark matter with a 231-day exposure of liquid argon using DEAP-3600 at SNOLAB

Understand

DEAP-3600 is a single-phase liquid argon (LAr) direct-detection dark matter experiment, operating 2 km underground at SNOLAB (Sudbury, Canada).

• The detector consists of 3279 kg of LAr contained in a spherical acrylic vessel.
• This paper reports on the analysis of a 758 tonne\cdot day exposure taken over a period of 231 live-days during the first year of operation.
• No candidate signal events are observed in the WIMP-search region of interest, which results in the leading limit on the WIMP-nucleon spin-independent cross section on a LAr target of $3.9\times10^{-45}$ cm$^{2}$ ($1.5\times10^{-44}$ cm$^{2}$) for a 100 GeV/c$^{2}$ (1 TeV/c$^{2}$) WIMP mass at 90\% C.