Title: 
Dark matter searches in liquid Xenon
   
Speaker: 
Alex Kish, UZH 

Abstract: 
In our present understanding, most of the matter in the Universe is in
a form of dark matter (non-baryonic and non-luminous), with the
best motivated candidate being a Weakly Interacting Massive
Particle (WIMP). Direct WIMPs detection is possible via their
interactions with nuclei in low background terrestrial targets. A
very efficient and promising technology which leads the active field
of dark matter searches is detectors based on noble liquids, in
particular xenon. They are relatively inexpensive, provide
easy scalability, require relatively simple cryogenic systems, and
have high scintillation and charge yields, which allows
background discrimination  with high efficiency.

In the talk I will briefly give the evidence for dark matter from
existing observations, introduce direct WIMP detection field, describe
the principles of particle detection with the xenon-based detectors,
and summarize my 8-years experience within the XENON project.
The technological advances and results of the XENON100 experiment will
be discussed, as well as the progress on the ongoing construction of
the XENON1T detector at LNGS. An outlook into the ultimate multi-ton
scale xenon-based experiment (DARWIN) will be also given.