The XENON100 Detector

Abstract: XENON100 is a liquid xenon (LXe) time projection chamber built to search for rare collisions of hypothetical, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Operated in a low-background shield at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy, XENON100 has reached the unprecedented background level of $&lt;$0.15 events/day/\kevr in the energy range below 100 \kevr in 30 kg of target mass, before electronic/nuclear recoil discrimination. It found no evidence for WIMPs during a dark matter run lasting for 100.9 live days in 2010, excluding with 90% confidence scalar WIMP-nucleon cross sections above 7x10$<sup>{-45}$ cm$<sup>{2}$ at a WIMP mass of 50 GeV/c$<sup>{2}$. A new run started in March 2011, and more than 200 live days of WIMP-search data have been acquired. Results of this second run are expected to be released in summer 2012.