Feasibility of Liquid-phase Xenon Proportional Scintillation for Low-energy Physics

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of liquid-phase xenon proportional scintillation as an alternative to dual-phase TPCs for low-energy physics, addressing technological challenges and background issues.

Contribution

It demonstrates that single-phase liquid xenon TPCs can discriminate recoil types without the need for a gas gap, challenging the necessity of dual-phase designs.

Findings

Single-phase liquid xenon TPCs can distinguish electronic and nuclear recoils.

Proportional scintillation can occur directly in liquid xenon.

Background of single-electron signals is likely unrelated to the liquid-gas interface.

Abstract

Dual phase xenon time projection chambers (TPCs) detect both the scintillation photons and ionization electrons created by energy depositions within the liquid xenon (LXe) volume. The electrons are extracted from the interaction site through a gas gap, where they meet a high electric field where proportional scintillation occurs. This converts the electron signal into a light signal, and yields a high electron detection efficiency with a gain of tens of photoelectrons (PE) per electron. This technique of detecting both scintillation and ionization gives dual phase xenon TPCs the capability to distinguish between electronic and nuclear recoils, which is a key part of how these detectors are able to reach world-leading limits on Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter. However, not all electrons can be extracted through the liquid-gas interface, and a constant millimeter-scale gas gap needs to be maintained, which may be a technological challenge if dual-phase xenon TPCs are to be scaled up for future dark matter searches. Furthermore, there is a background of single-electron peaks that follow a large ionization signal (S2) of unclear origin which may be due in part to the liquid-gas interface, and limits the sensitivity of these detectors towards low mass dark matter. In this paper, we demonstrate that a purely single-phase liquid xenon TPC which produces proportional scintillation directly in the liquid is still capable of discriminating between electronic and nuclear recoils, but that the background of single-electrons following an S2 is still likely unrelated to the liquid-gas interface.