Searching for Dark Matter: The LUX Experiment
de Viveiros, Luiz (LIP-Coimbra)

The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) is a dark matter direct detection experiment being deployed at the Homestake Mine in South Dakota, USA. The LUX detector is a dual-phase Xe TPC, with a total liquid Xe mass of 350 kg. It leverages the dual-phase Xe technology and expertise from the XENON and ZEPLIN-III experiments, while adding improvements in key areas, such as shielding and cryogenics, to support the increase in mass and to improve backgrounds. It aims at a sensitivity of 7e-46 cm^2 for the WIMP-nucleon cross-section for a 100 GeV/cm^2 WIMP, an order of magnitude better than existing detectors. The detector is currently running at a surface facility at Homestake, undergoing calibration and testing of all subsystems before final deployment underground by the end of 2011. In this talk, we present the experiment and its status, with a focus on the design elements that make the detector a major competitor in the field of dark matter detection.