Simultaneous Measurement of Ionization and Scintillation from Nuclear Recoils in Liquid Xenon as Target for a Dark Matter Experiment

Aprile, E.; Dahl, C. E.; DeViveiros, L.; Gaitskell, R.; Giboni, K. L.; Kwong, J.; Majewski, P.; Ni, K.; Shutt, T.; Yamashita, M.

Simultaneous Measurement of Ionization and Scintillation from Nuclear Recoils in Liquid Xenon as Target for a Dark Matter Experiment

Authors

Description

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 prototypes, developed for the XENON Dark Matter project. We find that the charge yield increases with decreasing recoil energy, and exhibits only a weak field dependence. These results are a first demonstration of the capability of dual phase xenon detectors to discriminate between electron and nuclear recoils, a key requirement for a sensitive dark matter search at recoil energies down to 20 keV.