Amole, C., Ardid Ramírez, Miguel|||0000-0002-3199-594X, Asner, D. M., Baxter, D., Behnke, E., Bhattacharjee, P., Borsodi, H., Bou Cabo, Manuel, Brice, S. J., Broemmelsiek, D., Clark, K., Collar, J.I., Cooper, P.S., Crisler, M., and Dahl, C. E.
New data are reported from the operation of a 2 liter C3F8 bubble chamber in the SNOLAB underground laboratory, with a total exposure of 211.5 kg days at four different energy thresholds below 10 keV. These data show that C3F8 provides excellent electron-recoil and alpha rejection capabilities at very low thresholds. The chamber exhibits an electron-recoil sensitivity of < 3.5 x 10(-10) and an alpha rejection factor of > 98.2%. These data also include the first observation of a dependence of acoustic signal on alpha energy. Twelve single nuclear recoil event candidates were observed during the run. The candidate events exhibit timing characteristics that are not consistent with the hypothesis of a uniform time distribution, and no evidence for a dark matter signal is claimed. These data provide the most sensitive direct detection constraints on WIMP-proton spin-dependent scattering to date, with significant sensitivity at low WIMP masses for spin-independent WIMP-nucleon scattering., The PICO Collaboration would like to thank SNOLAB and its staff for providing an exceptional underground laboratory space and invaluable technical support. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics under award DE-SC-0012161. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is operated by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. De-AC02-07CH11359. Part of the research described in this paper was conducted under the Ultra Sensitive Nuclear Measurements Initiative at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a multiprogram national laboratory operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy. We acknowledge the National Science Foundation for their support including Grants No. PHY-1242637, No. PHY-0919526, and No. PHY-1205987. We acknowledge the support of the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). We also acknowledge support from the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. We acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Consolider MultiDark CSD2009-00064 Grant. We acknowledge support from the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Government of India, under the Center for AstroParticle Physics II project (CAPP-II) at Saha Insititute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata. We acknowledge the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Grant No. LM2011027. We acknowledge technical assistance from Fermilab's Computing, Particle Physics, and Accelerator Divisions, and from A. Behnke at IUSB.