Simultaneous measurement of ionization and scintillation from nuclear recoils in liquid xenon for a dark matter experiment

We report the first measurements of the absolute ionization yield of nuclear recoils in liquid xenon, as a function of energy and electric field. Independent experiments were carried out with two dual-phase time-projection chamber prototypes, developed for the XENON dark matter project. We find that...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Physical review letters Vol. 97; no. 8; p. 081302
Main Authors:	Aprile, E, Dahl, C E, de Viveiros, L, Gaitskell, R J, Giboni, K L, Kwong, J, Majewski, P, Ni, K, Shutt, T, Yamashita, M
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States 25-08-2006
Subjects:	CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSICS ELECTRIC FIELDS ELECTRONS ENERGY DEPENDENCE IONIZATION KEV RANGE 10-100 LIQUIDS NONLUMINOUS MATTER RECOILS SCINTILLATIONS TIME PROJECTION CHAMBERS XENON
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Summary:	We report the first measurements of the absolute ionization yield of nuclear recoils in liquid xenon, as a function of energy and electric field. Independent experiments were carried out with two dual-phase time-projection chamber prototypes, developed for the XENON dark matter project. We find that the charge yield increases with decreasing recoil energy, and exhibits only a weak field dependence. These results are the first unambiguous demonstration of the capability of dual-phase xenon detectors to discriminate between electron and nuclear recoils down to 20 keV, a key requirement for a sensitive dark matter search.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0031-9007 1079-7114
DOI:	10.1103/physrevlett.97.081302