The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) Collaboration is designing a new generation of low background, noble liquid bubble chamber experiments with sub-keV nuclear recoil threshold. These experiments combine the electronic recoil blindness of a bubble chamber with the energy resolution of noble liquid scintillation, and maintain electron recoil discrimination at higher degrees of superheat (lower nuclear recoil thresholds) than Freon-based bubble chambers. A 10-kg liquid argon bubble chamber has the potential to set world leading limits on the dark matter nucleon cross-section for O(GeV/c2) masses, and to perform a high statistics coherent elastic neutrino nuclear scattering measurement with reactor neutrinos. This work presents a detailed calibration plan to measure the detector response of these experiments, combining photoneutron scattering with two new techniques to induce sub-keV nuclear recoils: nuclear Thomson scattering and thermal neutron capture.
@article{arxiv.2511.19817,
title = {Calibration Plan for the SBC 10-kg Liquid Argon Detector with 100 eV Target Threshold},
author = {E. Alfonso-Pita and D. Baxter and E. Behnke and J. Corbett and M. Crisler and C. E. Dahl and K. Dering and A. de St. Croix and D. Durnford and P. Giampa and J. Hall and O. Harris and H. Hawley-Herrera and L. Joseph and A. Kucich and N. Lamb and M. Laurin and I. Levine and W. H. Lippincott and B. Mitra and R. Neilson and O. Nicholson and M. -C. Piro and G. Putnam and D. Pyda and Z. Sheng and G. Sweeney and O. Valdés-Martínez and E. Vázquez-Jáuregui and S. Westerdale and T. J. Whitis and S. Windle and A. Wright and E. Wyman and R. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.19817},
year = {2025}
}