A compact Optical Liquid Argon Facility at Roma Tre

In this paper we present a compact test facility for the measurement of optical properties of liquid argon as scintillator. The setup is under preparation at Roma Tre and it has a volume of 40 L liquid argon, which is liquefied from argon gas with a purity of $\ge 99.9999\%$ vol. To readout the scintillation photons from liquid argon with the highest intensity near 127 nm, we use the vacuum ultraviolet silicon photomultipliers from Hamamatsu. By submerging the photon detectors directly inside the liquid argon, we can eliminate the systematics from the wavelength shifter and light guides which have been commonly used to detect the scintillation photons of liquid argon.