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The Korea Invisible Mass Search (KIMS Collaboration), is a South Korean experiment, led by Sun Kee Kim, searching for Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), one of the strongest candidates for dark matter. The experiments use CsI(Tl) crystals at YangYang Underground Laboratory (Y2L), in tunnels from a preexisting underground power plant. KIMS is supported by the Creative Research Initiative program of the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation. It is the first physics experiment located, and largely built, in Korea.
Contents
Other research topics include detector development for a neutrinoless double beta decay search and the creation of an extreme low temperature diamond calorimeter.
History
The KIMS experiment was funded in 2000 to search for WIMP dark matter. To avoid the cost of creating a new underground tunnel for testing, the Yangyang Pumped Storage Power Plant belonging to Korea Middleland Power Co. in Yangyang, Korea was used. Construction was completed in 2003. The CsI(Tl) scintillating crystal used has a high light yield is affordable for large mass. After a substantial effort for the initial setup and crystal development, KIMS began recording data in 2004 with one full-size 6 kg crystal. A 4 crystal setup was run in 2005-2006 to optimize the WIMP search. In 2008, the 12 crystal array with mass 103.4 kg was completed and ran until December 2012 for a detector upgrade replacing the PMTs.
Results
The first WIMP cross section search was published in 2006 using the one crystal data. New limits were presented in 2007 and 2012, inconsistent with the DAMA signal reports for masses above 20 Gev. Using 24324.3 kg days exposure, low-mass WIMP signals below 20 GeV were disfavored in 2014.
COSINE
The KIMS and DM-Ice groups have joined forces to make a new detector consisting of an array of NaI(Tl) scintillating crystals to confirm or refute the DAMA/LIBRA results. As of July 2016, the 100 kg COSINE-100 experiment has been installed at Y2L and will be operating soon.