The hunt for Dark Matter plays a truly critical role in contemporary physics. At both the largest and smallest scales, deep questions are being raised about the fundamental nature of the universe - questions that confirmation and then characterisation of particle dark matter will provide many answers to. This thesis presents some of the world's most sensitive searches to date for certain types of axion dark matter, axion-like particles, and two-neutrino double electron capture. These have been conducted using the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment. Evidence for dark matter and physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics is described in Chapter 1, while Chapter 2 gives an overview of proposed candidates for particle dark matter. The various experimental approaches being used to detect particle dark matter are presented in Chapter 3. Direct detection with time projection chambers plays a major role in this thesis, with particular interest in the LUX detector, that is described in its components and operations. Chapter 4 presents LUX direct searches for weakly interacting massive particles. Although I have contributed to these analyses, they are included for completeness only, as they are not part of my central work. The LUX collaboration's searches for axion dark matter and axion-like particle have delivered world-leading results on the axion-electron coupling constant. These results, that I personally led and which have been published in Physics Review Letters, are presented in Chapter 5, along with sensitivity studies, also led by me, made for the future LUX-ZEPLIN experiment. Finally, a search for two-neutrino double electron capture of 124Xe, that I performed using LUX data to extract a limit on the half life of the process, is presented in Chapter 6. Although being allowed by the Standard Model, two-neutrino double electron capture shares the matrix element calculation framework with the neutrinoless channel of the same process, becoming of great interest in the scope of neutrino physics. Conclusions follow and close the thesis.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:14:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 8387291 bytes, checksum: 02ffc69a044d7312934d6910183b8440 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-25 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / In this work we consider a minimal local abelian gauge group extension with charge B - 3Le anomaly-free. We add a right-handed singlet Majorana fermion plus a neutral and charged scalars, responsible for spontaneous symmetry breaking and a charged singlet scalar to provide a connection between the electron and the Majorana fermion. The aim of this model is provide a low energy theory to Dark matter as a Majorana fermion. There are several evidences of a new kind of a non-baryonic matter but its nature and properties are not well established. So, based in some experiments (in particular those that main focus is the direct detection), we are going to constraint some parameters of the model to test its feasibility in this context. We have used a computational program called micrOMEGAs (based on CalCHEP) to compute the abundance and scattering cross section between dark matter and nucleon and compare with the experimental constraints arising from Planck (abundance) and LUX (scattering cross section). We show that the results support the restrictions imposed by the observations providing future perspectives for this extension, like indirect detection of dark matter. / Nesta dissertação consideramos uma extensão abeliana mínima local, de carga B-3Le, livre de anomalias, onde foi introduzido um férmion de majorana de mão direita juntamente com um novo bóson escalar, responsável pela quebra espontânea da simetria local, e um escalar carregado conectando a família de léptons ao férmion de majorana. Este modelo tem por objetivo fornecer uma teoria de baixas energias para a matéria escura atribuída a um férmion de majorana. Logo, baseado em alguns experimentos (em particular aqueles cujo principal objetivo é a detecção direta de uma possível nova partícula atribuída à esta matéria), iremos vincular os parâmetros de nosso modelo a fim de verificar sua aplicabilidade neste senário. Com isto, utilizaremos o programa computacional micrOMEGAS (que utiliza o CalcHEP) a fim de calcular alguns observáveis do modelo, tais como a abundância e secção transversal de choque do espalhamento elástico entre a matéria escura e o nucleon e, em seguida, comparamos aos dados experimentais do Planck (abundância) e LUX (seção de choque). Resultados preliminares apontam para a validade do modelo diante das restrições impostas pelas observações, possibilitando a perspectiva de aplicação desta extensão em outros contextos, como os da detecção indireta da matéria escura.