Interpretation of Light-Quenching Factor Measurements

Abstract

We observe that the pattern of the quenching factors for scintillation light from various ions, recently studied in $CaW{O}_4$ in connection with dark matter detectors, can be understood as a saturation phenomenon in which the light output is simply proportional to track length, independent of the ion and its energy. This observation is in accord with the high dE/dx limit of Birks' law. It suggests a simple model for the intrinsic resolution of light detectors for low energy ions, which we briefly discuss.

Seven pages, seven figures, some with color

References in corpus (4)

• Limits on WIMP dark matter using scintillating CaWO4 cryogenic detectors with active background suppression
• Discrimination between Nuclear Recoils and Electron Recoils by Simultaneous Detection of Phonons and Scintillation Light
• Light Neutralinos as Dark Matter in the Unconstrained Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model
• New Technique for the Measurement of the Scintillation Efficiency of Nuclear Recoils

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Commissioning Run of the CRESST-II Dark Matter Search
• Search for Dark Matter with CRESST
• Impure Thoughts on Inelastic Dark Matter
• Energy-Dependent Light Quenching in CaWO${}_4$ Crystals at mK Temperatures
• Surface roughness interpretation of 730 kg days CRESST-II results
• Low-Temperature Light Detectors: Neganov-Luke Amplification and Calibration
• Neutron Scattering Facility for Characterization of CRESST and EURECA Detectors at mK Temperatures