 A new experimental effort to search for particle dark matter, the Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics will debut at the end of summer 2004. A prototype bubble chamber sensitive to Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), developed by our group, is to be installed in the MINOS near detector gallery at Fermilab (FNAL). The chamber will contain two kg of CF3I, a fire-extinguishing liquid that can be superheated to respond to very low energy nuclear recoils like those expected from WIMPs while being totally insensitive to minimum ionizing particles, the dominant background in this type of searches.
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