Related papers: Scintillation of Liquid Helium for Low-Energy Nucl…
Superfluid $^4$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…
The scintillation yield for recoil Ar ions of 5 to 250 keV energy in liquid argon have been evaluated for direct dark matter searches. Lindhard theory is taken for estimating nuclear quenching. A theoretical model based on a biexcitonic…
Experiments searching for weak interacting massive particles with noble gases such as liquid argon require very low detection thresholds for nuclear recoils. A determination of the scintillation efficiency is crucial to quantify the…
We have performed measurements of scintillation light in liquid neon, observing a signal yield in our detector as high as (3.5 $\pm$ 0.4) photoelectrons/keV. We measure pulse shape discrimination efficiency between electronic and nuclear…
Liquid Xenon (LXe) is expected to be an excellent target and detector medium to search for dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). Knowledge of LXe ionization and scintillation response to low energy nuclear…
The scintillation light yield of liquid argon from nuclear recoils relative to electronic recoils has been measured as a function of recoil energy from 10 keVr up to 250 keVr. The scintillation efficiency, defined as the ratio of the…
We examine in depth a recent proposal to utilize superfluid helium for direct detection of sub-MeV mass dark matter. For sub-keV recoil energies, nuclear scattering events in liquid helium primarily deposit energy into long-lived phonon and…
Liquid xenon detectors such as XENON10 and XENON100 obtain a significant fraction of their sensitivity to light (<10 GeV) particle dark matter by looking for nuclear recoils of only a few keV, just above the detector threshold. Yet in this…
We perform a theoretical study of the scintillation efficiency in the low-energy region crucial for liquid-xenon dark-matter detectors. We develop a computer program to simulate the cascading process of the recoiling xenon nucleus in liquid…
Scintillation and ionisation yields for nuclear recoils in liquid xenon above 10 keVnr (nuclear recoil energy) are deduced from data acquired using broadband Am-Be neutron sources. The nuclear recoil data from several exposures to two…
Liquid xenon is an important detection medium in direct dark matter experiments, which search for low-energy nuclear recoils produced by the elastic scattering of WIMPs with quarks. The two existing measurements of the relative…
Direct searches for light dark matter particles (mass $<10$ GeV) are especially challenging because of the low energies transferred in elastic scattering to typical heavy nuclear targets. We investigate the possibility of using liquid…
We present new measurements of the scintillation and ionization yields in liquid xenon for low energy electronic (about 3--7 keV$_{ee}$) and nuclear recoils (about 8--20 keV$_{nr}$) at different drift fields from 236 V/cm to 3.93 kV/cm,…
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…
Liquid xenon-based direct detection dark matter experiments have recently expanded their searches to include high-energy nuclear recoil events as motivated by effective field theory dark matter and inelastic dark matter interaction models,…
The use of liquid helium and neon as scintillators for neutrino detection is investigated. Several unique properties of these cryogens make them promising candidates for real-time solar neutrino spectroscopy: large ultraviolet scintillation…
XENON10 is an experiment designed to directly detect particle dark matter. It is a dual phase (liquid/gas) xenon time-projection chamber with 3D position imaging. Particle interactions generate a primary scintillation signal (S1) and…
We show that a two-excitation process in superfluid helium, combined with sensitivity to meV energy depositions, can probe dark matter down to the ~keV warm dark matter mass limit. This mass reach is three orders of magnitude below what can…
Liquid Xenon (LXe) is an excellent material for experiments designed to detect dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). A low energy detection threshold is essential for a sensitive WIMP search. The…
We show for the first time that the quenching of electronic excitation from nuclear recoils in liquid xenon is well-described by Lindhard theory, if the nuclear recoil energy is reconstructed using the combined (scintillation and…