The ZEPLIN III dark matter project

ZEPLIN III is an advanced two-phase xenon detector designed to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), such as the neutralino, which make up the dark matter halo of the Galaxy. It has an active target mass of ∼6 kg and uses two signal channels to discriminate between different particle species interacting in the detector. This allows nuclear recoil signatures of WIMPs to be separated from the more numerous background of events generated by photons. By pushing the performance of this type of detector to its limits and incorporating a neutron veto, it will be shown that ZEPLIN III should reach a limiting sensitivity to a coherent elastic WIMP-nucleon scattering cross-section of 10−8 pb.