Lowering the low-energy threshold of xenon detectors
Abstract
We show that the energy threshold for nuclear recoils in the XENON10 dark matter search data can be lowered to ~1 keV, by using only the ionization signal. In other words, we make no requirement that a valid event contain a primary scintillation signal. We therefore relinquish incident particle type discrimination, which is based on the ratio of ionization to scintillation in liquid xenon. This method compromises the detector's ability to precisely determine the z coordinate of a particle interaction. However, we show for the first time that it is possible to discriminate bulk events from surface events based solely on the ionization signal.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1011.6439,
title = {Lowering the low-energy threshold of xenon detectors},
author = {P. Sorensen and J. Angle and E. Aprile and F. Arneodo and L. Baudis and A. Bernstein and A. Bolozdynya and P. Brusov and L. C. C. Coelho and C. E. Dahl and L. DeViveiros and A. D. Ferella and L. M. P. Fernandes and S. Fiorucci and R. J. Gaitskell and K. L. Giboni and R. Gomez and R. Hasty and L. Kastens and J. Kwong and J. A. M. Lopes and N. Madden and A. Manalaysay and A. Manzur and D. N. McKinsey and M. E. Monzani and K. Ni and U. Oberlack and J. Orboeck and G. Plante and R. Santorelli and J. M. F. dos Santos and P. Shagin and T. Shutt and S. Schulte and C. Winant and M. Yamashita},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1011.6439},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
Conference proceedings from the Identification of Dark Matter 2010, Montpellier, France. To be published by SISSA as PoS(IDM2010)017