Welcome to the homepage of the DARWIN project

DARWIN is a design study towards the realisation of future astroparticle infrastructure in Europe as identified in the ASPERA Roadmap. The proposal was funded through the first ASPERA common call, from the virtual pot created from contributions from the national funding agencies participating in the call. The aim of DARWIN is to complete the necessary research for the construction of a ton-scale liquid xenon detector and a multi-ton scale liquid argon detector for the direct detection of particle dark matter with a sensitivity which is three orders of magnitudes beyond the one of existing experiments. Such a detector would not only have a realistic chance of discovering the nature of dark matter, but would also be able to study its properties such as mass, interaction strength and its local distribution in our galaxy.

DARWIN brings together several European and American groups working in the existing XENON, WARP and ArDM collaborations and unites expertise on liquid noble gas detectors, low-background techniques, cryogenic infrastructure, shielding and astroparticle physics phenomenology. Even though noble liquid detectors are a relative newcomer in the field of direct dark matter detection, they have been shown to be highly competitive to the other main technologies in this area. They offer low-threshold, ultra-low background and position-sensitive detectors which can be scaled to large target masses which are required to detect weakly interacting massive particles.