The COUPP Dark Matter Search- Results from the first year of deep underground running

In the summer of 2010 the COUPP collaboration deployed a 4kg bubble chamber dark matter detector 6800' below ground at SNOLAB. A relative newcomer to the hunt for dark matter, COUPP bubble chambers are sensitive to the ~10 keV nuclear recoils expected from scattering WIMP dark matter particles but completely insensitive, at the 10^-10 level, to the gamma and beta backgrounds that limit other direct detection experiments. Developments in acoustic discrimination between nuclear recoils and alpha decays in COUPP chambers have led to world-leading limits on the spin-dependent WIMP-proton cross section, and the 4kg chamber at SNOLAB has extended our recently published limits by another order of magnitude. COUPP's next generation 60 kg chamber is now being commissioned at Fermilab, to be deployed to SNOLAB in 2012. These chambers will potentially make COUPP the world-leader in both spin-dependent and spin-independent WIMP detection.

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