Winter 2025 Collaboration Meeting at SNOLAB
Summer 2024 Collaboration Meeting in Prague
PICO Collaboration members participating in the 2023 collaboration meeting at Université de Montréal.

Welcome to the PICO Project

PICO is a joint collaboration formed by the merger of the PICASSO and COUPP collaborations.

The PICO experiment has demonstrated that moderately superheated bubble chambers can be used for the direct detection of nuclear recoils, operating at energy thresholds as low as 2.45 keV (publications). Three detectors (2L, 60, 40L) were constructed 2 km underground at the SNOLAB facility in Sudbury, Ontario (Canada). Presently, the collaboration is operating the PICO-40L instrument, a bubble chamber filled with approximately 70 kg of C₃F₈. Additionally, a scaled-up detector with a target mass approximately 250 kg (PICO-500) is fully funded and currently in the assembly and construction phase.

To learn more about the previous and upcoming experiments, please follow the embedded links to learn about PICO’s search for dark matter.

A test assembly of of the PICO-500 jars with the bellows system.
Red lights illuminate the inside of the chamber so cameras can photograph bubbles
The PICO-40L experiment is assembled
Assembly of the PICO-2L detector at SNOLAB.
Assembling PICO-60
Stephen Hawking’s visit to SNOLAB (2012). Standing outside the PICO-60 water tank, where an inside view of the detector is shown on the computer.