Development of a large-mass, low-threshold detector system with simultaneous measurements of athermal phonons and scintillation light

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel large-mass detector system that simultaneously measures athermal phonons and scintillation light, enabling improved event discrimination for particle detection applications.

Contribution

It introduces a combined low-threshold detector system with enhanced light collection efficiency and large mass, advancing event discrimination capabilities.

Findings

Successful integration of phonon and light detection in a large-mass system

Potential for improved particle event discrimination

Plans for tenfold increase in light collection efficiency

Abstract

We have combined two low-threshold detector technologies to develop a large-mass, low-threshold detector system that simultaneously measures the athermal phonons in a sapphire detector while an adjacent silicon high-voltage detector detects the scintillation light from the sapphire detector. This detector system could provide event-by-event discrimination between electron and nuclear events due to the difference in their scintillation light yield. While such systems with simultaneous phonon and light detection have been demonstrated earlier with smaller detectors, our system is designed to provide a large detector mass with high amplification for the limited scintillation light. Future work will focus on at least an order of magnitude improvement in the light collection efficiency by having a highly reflective detector housing and custom phonon mask design to maximize light collection by the silicon high-voltage detector.