Abstract:
DarkSide-50 is the current phase of the DarkSide direct dark matter
search program, operating underground at the Laboratori Nazionali
del Gran Sasso in Italy. The detector is a dual-phase argon Time
Projection Chamber (TPC), designed for direct detection of Weakly
Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), and housed within a veto
system of liquid scintillator and water Cherenkov detectors. Since
switching to a target of low radioactivity argon extracted from
underground sources in April 2015, the background is no longer
dominated by naturally occurring Ar-39. However, alpha backgrounds
from radon and its daughters remain, both from the liquid argon bulk
and internal detector surfaces. This talk will focus on the analysis of
alpha events in DarkSide-50. In some cases, the alpha events are a
dangerous background in need of mitigation. In others, the alpha
events can be used as a tool to deepen our understanding of our
detector.