Performance of a Radial Time Projection Chamber with Electroluminescence in Liquid Xenon

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel single-phase radial TPC that generates and detects electroluminescence directly in liquid xenon, simplifying detector design for dark matter and neutrino experiments.

Contribution

It presents the design and performance evaluation of a new RTPC that overcomes uniformity issues by producing electroluminescence directly in LXe using a single central wire.

Findings

Successful creation and detection of electroluminescence in LXe

Simplified detector design with a single wire

Discussion of limitations for future applications

Abstract

The dual-phase xenon time projection chamber (TPC) is a leading detector technology in rare event searches for dark matter and neutrino physics. The success of this type of detector technology relies on its capability to detect both primary scintillation and ionization signals from particle interactions in liquid xenon (LXe). The ionization electrons are converted into electroluminescence in the gas xenon (GXe), where a single electron can be amplified by more than 100 times in number of photons in a strong electric field. Maintaining a strong and uniform electric field in the small gas gap in large diameter TPCs is challenging. One alternative solution is to produce the electroluminescence in the LXe directly to overcome the gas gap uniformity problem. Here we report on the design and performance of a single-phase Radial TPC (RTPC) which can create and detect the electroluminescence directly in LXe. It simplifies the design and operation of the LXe TPC by using a single wire in the axial center to create the strong electric field. We present the performance of such an RTPC and discuss its limitations for potential applications.