PandaX is designed to build and operate a ton-scale liquid xenon experiment to detect the so far elusive dark matter in the Universe. The PandaX experiment will use a two-phase (liquid and gas) xenon position-sensitive time projection chamber detector. The program will evolve in two stages, initially probing the low-mass regime (<10 GeV) with a nuclear- recoil energy threshold of about 5 keV and ultimately employing a ton-scale detector to probe the higher-mass regime (10–1,000 GeV), reaching a sensitivity down to 10^-47 cm^2 for spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section.

Design of the PandaX stage-1a TPC integrated with the inner vessel


The PandaX experiment is designed as a next generation liquid xenon experiment using the two-phase technique. It is located at the China Jin-Ping underground Laboratory (CJPL), which is in the middle of a 18-km tunnel under 2400 meters of rock overburden, in the Sichuan province of south-west China. As one of the deepest underground labs in the world, the CJPL has an extremely low flux of muon rate of less than 20/m^2/100-day, which is about two orders of magnitude lower than the flux at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory (LNGS) in Italy. The low muon rate and the resulting background makes the lab ideal for a sensitive dark matter detection.

Located in the Sichuan province of China, CJPL is one of the deepest underground labs in the world