Scintillation yield from electronic and nuclear recoils in superfluid $^4$He
Abstract
Superfluid He is a promising target material for direct detection of light ( 1 GeV) dark matter. Possible signal channels available for readout in this medium include prompt photons, triplet excimers, and roton and phonon quasiparticles. The relative yield of these signals has implications for the sensitivity and discrimination power of a superfluid He dark matter detector. Using a 16~cm volume of 1.75~K superfluid He read out by six immersed photomultiplier tubes, we measured the scintillation from electronic recoils ranging between 36.3 and 185 keV, yielding a mean signal size of ~phe/keV, and nuclear recoils from 53.2 to 1090 keV. We compare the results of our relative scintillation yield measurements to an existing semiempirical model based on helium-helium and electron-helium interaction cross sections. We also study the behavior of delayed scintillation components as a function of recoil type and energy, a further avenue for signal discrimination in superfluid He.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2108.02176,
title = {Scintillation yield from electronic and nuclear recoils in superfluid $^4$He},
author = {HeRALD Collaboration and A. Biekert and C. Chang and C. W. Fink and M. Garcia-Sciveres and E. C. Glazer and W. Guo and S. A. Hertel and S. Kravitz and J. Lin and M. Lisovenko and R. Mahapatra and D. N. McKinsey and J. S. Nguyen and V. Novosad and W. Page and P. K. Patel and B. Penning and H. D. Pinckney and M. Pyle and R. K. Romani and A. S. Seilnacht and A. Serafin and R. J. Smith and P. Sorensen and B. Suerfu and A. Suzuki and V. Velan and G. Wang and S. L. Watkins and V. G. Yefremenko and L. Yuan and J. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.02176},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
17 pages, 19 figures