Greetings,

My name is Jason Parks and this summer working as an intern with the CIERA-REU alongside PICO here at Northwestern University was very exciting. I was able to be apart of a project that is designing a prototype for direct detection of dark matter called a scintillating xenon bubble chamber. This dark matter particle detector is designed to look for Dark Matter particles from the Milky Way dark matter halo, which we think are continually flying through us. My chief responsibility this summer was testing the temperature and pressure control systems for the scintillating xenon bubble chamber. This required maintaining a temperature of -100 degrees Celsius in liquid nitrogen cooled cryostat. We used a closed loop PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) control method along with an internal heater to keep the detector environment at the desired temperature, with the goals of reaching a desired set point quickly and maintaining a temperature stable to within 0.01 degrees Celsius. With the PID control loop we achieved a temperature stable to 0.003 digress Celsius and accurate to 0.09 degrees Celsius, meeting the requirements for efficient detection.