Measurements of Scintillation Efficiency and Pulse-Shape for Low Energy Recoils in Liquid Xenon

TL;DR

This study measures the scintillation efficiency and pulse-shape characteristics of low-energy nuclear and electron recoils in liquid xenon, providing key data for dark matter detection and particle physics experiments.

Contribution

It presents new measurements of scintillation efficiency and pulse-shape parameters for low-energy recoils in liquid xenon, improving understanding of detector responses.

Findings

Nuclear recoil scintillation efficiency is 0.22 +/- 0.01 between 40-70 keV.

Decay time constant T0 for nuclear recoils is approximately 21 ns.

Electron recoil T0 increases with energy, reaching about 30 ns at 15 keV.

Abstract

Results of observations of low energy nuclear and electron recoil events in liquid xenon scintillator detectors are given. The relative scintillation efficiency for nuclear recoils is 0.22 +/- 0.01 in the recoil energy range 40 keV - 70 keV. Under the assumption of a single dominant decay component to the scintillation pulse-shape the log-normal mean parameter T0 of the maximum likelihood estimator of the decay time constant for 6 keV < Eee < 30 keV nuclear recoil events is equal to 21.0 ns +/- 0.5 ns. It is observed that for electron recoils T0 rises slowly with energy, having a value ~ 30 ns at Eee ~ 15 keV. Electron and nuclear recoil pulse-shapes are found to be well fitted by single exponential functions although some evidence is found for a double exponential form for the nuclear recoil pulse-shape.