The identification of dark matter is one of the most important challenges in contemporary physics. IFUNAM participates since 2015 in experiments of direct search for dark matter, using different techniques. The PICO experiment uses superheated liquids (C3F8) in bubble chambers; the DEAP experiment uses liquid argon; the SBC experiment will be A bubble chamber with liquid argon and the DarkSide-20k and ARGO experiments will also use liquid argon as part of the global collaboration to search for dark matter with argon. PICO and DEAP are located in the Canadian SNOLAB underground laboratory near Sudbury, Ontario, 2 kilometers below the earth's surface.
On the other hand, neutrino detection has been developed as a modern astrophysical exploration technique. It allows us, for example, to study the reactions in the sun, the composition of the earth, among many other interesting topics. Observation of double beta decay, without neutrinos, would allow us to determine whether the neutrinos are Dirac or Majorana particles. IFUNAM collaborates since 2015 in the SNO + experiment, a detector of approximately one thousand tons of liquid scintillator, which will use tellurium-130 isotope to perform a very sensitive search for neutrino-free double beta decay. SNO + also studies solar neutrinos, geo-neutrinos, reactor oscillations and serves as a supernova neutrino detector. Likewise, it collaborates in the SBC experiment, which will be a liquid argon chamber to detect coherent neutrino-core scattering. A study has also been initiated to study the feasibility of measuring this process at the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant in Mexico. Finally, they participate in the TIPS experiment, a liquid scintillator detector that seeks to observe and measure for the first time the double beta decay with neutrinos in the tin-124 isotope.
IFUNAM has an instrumentation laboratory for neutrino and dark matter detectors, in which prototypes and measurements of low background noise are developed, in addition to the construction of detectors.
