Session Y6 - Cosmology, Particle Astrophysics and Gravitational Wave Astronomy.
ORAL session, Tuesday afternoon, April 23
Aztec, Albuquerque Convention Center
In the fall of 2001 the CDMS II (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) experiment deployed a set of 6 ZIP (Z-dependent Ionization and Phonon) detectors at the Stanford shallow underground facility. The 4 250g Ge detectors, and 2 100g Si detectors, are able to perform a direct detection search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) by discriminating among nuclear recoils, due to neutrons and WIMPs, from electron recoils, due to gammas and betas, down to recoil energies below 10 keV. The goals of this run are to improve upon the 1999 CDMS I upper limit as well as to precisely measure the backgrounds on these detectors in preparation for their deployment at the Soudan deep site in the summer of 2002.