Research Field:
Particles from Space

An experimental effort to search for particle dark matter, the Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics debuted in 2004. A prototype bubble chamber sensitive to Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) was installed in the MINOS near detector gallery at Fermilab (FNAL). The chamber contained two kg of CF₃I, a fire-extinguishing liquid that can be superheated to respond to very low energy nuclear recoils like those expected from WIMPs while being totally insensitive to minimum ionizing particles, the dominant background in this type of searches. The COUPP collaboration presently runs a 4 kg chamber in the Canadian SNOlab underground site, a recently commissioned 60 kg chamber, and is designing a 500 kg device.

The COUPP and Picasso collaborations have merged their efforts and become the PICO collaboration.

<a target='_blank' href='http://collargroup.uchicago.edu/projects/wimp/index.html'>Local COUPP Website</a> (introduction to COUPP)
<a target='_blank' href='http://www-coupp.fnal.gov/'>COUPP site at FNAL</a>
<a target='_blank' href='http://www.picoexperiment.com/'>PICO Website</a>