LUX & XeBrA: dark matter searches and electric field breakdown studies in noble liquids

The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment recently concluded 3 years of rare event searches 4,850 feet below ground in the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. Since LUX was a two-phase time projection chamber, a precise understanding of electric field inside the detector was necessary for appropriate data analysis. However, direct measurement of the electric field was not possible, so instead it was reconstructed from calibration measurements taken during the search. This talk will highlight work done to model the changing electric field of the LUX detector throughout the data taking period. I will also discuss a new search for sub-GeV dark matter candidates with LUX data. The Xenon Breakdown Apparatus (XeBrA) is an experiment intended to characterize high voltage behavior in liquid argon and liquid xenon and thereby inform the design of increasingly large noble liquid detectors. I will present the first results from XeBrA, with breakdown data acquired at electrode areas ~10x larger than achieved in previous experiments.

Room 102/103