Results From The Two-tower Run Of The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has completed two runs at the Soudan Underground Laboratory In the second, two towers of detectors were operated from March to August 2004. CDMS used Ge and Si ZIP (Z-sensitive, Ionization, and Phonon) detectors, operated at 50mK, to look for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) which may make up most of the dark matter in our universe. These detectors are surrounded by lead and polyethylene shielding as well as an active muon veto. These shields, as well as the overburden of Soudan rock, provide a low background environment for the detectors. The ZIP detectors record the ratio of ionization signal to phonon signal to discriminate between nuclear recoils, characteristic of WIMPS and neutrons, and electron recoils, characteristic of gamma and beta backgrounds. They also provide timing information from the four phonon channels that is used to reject surface events, for which ionization collection is poor. A blind analysis, defined using calibration data taken in situ throughout the run, provides a definition of the WIMP signal region by rejecting backgrounds. This analysis applied to the WIMP search data gives a limit on the spin independent WIMP- nucleon cross-section that is an order of magnitude lower than any other experiment has published