English

Electron-ion recombination in composite interactions in liquid xenon

High Energy Physics - Experiment 2025-07-17 v2 Instrumentation and Detectors

Abstract

The response of liquid xenon to various types of ionizing radiation has been extensively studied theoretically and experimentally. Recent progress in direct detection dark matter experiments highlights the significance of composite events, where multiple particles interact with xenon simultaneously and generate overlapping ionization signatures. In these events, recombination of electrons and ions associated with different primary particles leads to additional suppression of the ionization signal, introducing a new source of uncertainty in dark matter searches and Migdal effect studies. We developed a model to estimate the recombination enhancement for overlapping low-energy particle interactions. This method, which has minimal dependence on xenon microphysics and is primarily driven by existing experimental data, yields predictions that are consistent with available measurements of composite interactions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the model predictions are robust against xenon microphysics assumptions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.07562,
  title  = {Electron-ion recombination in composite interactions in liquid xenon},
  author = {J. Xu and J. Kim and B. Lenardo and C. E. Dahl and R. L. Mannino and G. M. Blockinger and C. A. Hardy and D. Adams and C. S. Amarasinghe and J. Bang and A. C. Vaitkus and C. Ding and W. H. Lippincott and M. Szydagis and C. Levy and R. J. Gaitskell and R. Essig},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.07562},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

11 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:14:25.982Z