Measurement of the Quantum Efficiency of Hamamatsu R8520 Photomultipliers at Liquid Xenon Temperature

Abstract

Vacuum ultraviolet light sensitive photomultiplier tubes directly coupled to liquid xenon are being used to efficiently detect the 178 nm scintillation light in a variety of liquid xenon based particle detectors. Good knowledge of the performance of these photomultipliers under cryogenic conditions is needed to properly characterize these detectors. Here, we report on measurements of the quantum efficiency of Hamamatsu R8520 photomultipliers, used in the XENON Dark Matter Experiments. The quantum efficiency measurements at room temperature agree with the values provided by Hamamatsu. At low temperatures, between 160K and 170K, the quantum efficiency increases by $\sim 5-11$% relative to the room temperature values.

References in corpus (4)

• Dark Matter Results from 100 Live Days of XENON100 Data
• The XENON100 Dark Matter Experiment
• Liquid Xenon Detectors for Particle Physics and Astrophysics
• Observation of Two-Neutrino Double-Beta Decay in Xe-136 with EXO-200

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Liquid noble gas detectors for low energy particle physics
• Studies of scintillation properties of CaMoO4 at millikelvin temperatures
• Measurement of the Scintillation Yield of Low-Energy Electrons in Liquid Xenon
• Measurement of the absolute Quantum Efficiency of Hamamatsu model R11410-10 photomultiplier tubes at low temperatures down to liquid xenon boiling point
• Measurements of proportional scintillation and electron multiplication in liquid xenon using thin wires
• First results of a large-area cryogenic gaseous photomultiplier coupled to a dual-phase liquid xenon TPC
• Proposal of a Geiger-type Single-Phase Liquid Xenon Time Projection Chamber as Potential Detector Technique for Dark Matter Direct Search
• Measurements of the position-dependent photo-detection sensitivity of the Hamamatsu R11410 and R8520 photomultiplier tubes
• VUV Transmission of PTFE for Xenon-based Particle Detectors
• Scintillation light increase of carbontetrafluoride gas at low temperature
• The DireXeno Experiment -- Measuring Correlated Scintillation Signatures in Liquid Xenon
• Study of light detection and sensitivity for a ton-scale liquid xenon dark matter detector