PandaX: Particle and Astrophysical Xenon Experiments

PandaX is a staged experimental program that utilizes xenon detectors to search for elusive dark matter particles and understand neutrinos' fundamental properties. The PandaX collaboration has now entered into the multi-ton stage, PandaX-4T.

PandaX-II is a dark matter direct detection experiment equipped with a half-ton scale dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC), operated in CJPL between Oct. 2014 and June 2019. In 2016 and 2017, PandaX-II produced the world leading constraints to dark matter-nucleon interactions. See a list of scientific publications here.

With 6-ton of total Xenon and 4-ton sensitive target, PandaX-4T aims to improve the dark matter sensitivity by one order of magnitude in comparison to PandaX-II. PandaX-4T also plans to make sensitive searches on neutrinoless double beta decay of , and other signals from new physics. This project is expected to commence data taking in 2021.

PandaX-III searches for the possible neutrinoless double beta decay with 200 kg to one ton of 90% enriched in a high pressure gaseous Xenon TPC.

News

  • The PandaX-II experiment is completed and the PandaX-4T experiment is under installation. The future PandaX program will focus on the following two main directions:

    1. Develop PandaX-4T into a multi-purpose liquid xenon experiment, to push further the dark matter search and other physics topics;
    2. Develop and operate a 100-kg high pressure gas TPC (HpgTPC), PandaX-III, as a pathfinder for a tracking calorimeter to search for $0\nu\beta\beta$ in ${}^{136}Xe$.

    Hello 2021!

    The full International Advisory Committee 2020 Report.
  • The PandaX collaboration released the latest results on the search of WIMPs and axions based on the full exposure of data at the International High Energy Physics Conference (ichep2020) on July 30, 2020. Detailed analyses were reported with an online seminar on August 20. The most stringent constraint is set for WIMPs around 10 GeV/c2 using the nuclear recoil events. The intriguing electron recoil event excess observed by XENON1T [1] was tested with the electron recoil data, and was found to be within the constraint of the PandaX-II data.
  • New results on the detection of axions and galaxy axion-like particles(ALPs) with 80 day of PandaX-II data were published online in Physical Review Letters on Nov 1, 2017 (on the same issue with another PandaX-II paper on 54 ton-day WIMP search results).

  • Recent result from PandaX-II was published on Physical Review Letter (Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 181302, "Editor's Suggestion") on October 30, 2017, back-to-back with the first result from XENON1T experiment. The papers are highlighted by a Physics "Viewpoint" commentary by Dan Hooper from FNAL and Univ. of Chicago, commenting that “...

  • The PandaX-II collaboration released the official WIMP search results using 54 ton-day exposure on Aug. 23, 2017. No excess events were found above the expected background. The most stringent upper limit on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section was set for a WIMP mass greater than $100 GeV/c^{2}$, with the lowest exclusion at $8.6\times10^{-47} cm^{2}$ at $40 GeV/c^{2}$. The result reported here is more conservative than the preliminary result shown during the TeVPA2017 conference, due to the adoption of updated photon/electron detection efficiencies.