Measuring Double-Electron Capture with Liquid Xenon Experiments

Abstract

We investigate the possibilities of observing the decay mode for ${}^{124}$Xe in which two electrons are captured, two neutrinos are emitted, and the final daughter nucleus is in its ground state, using dark matter experiments with liquid xenon. The first upper limit of the decay half-life is calculated to be 1.66$\times 10^{21}$ years at a 90% confidence level (C.L.) obtained with the published background data from the XENON100 experiment. Employing a known background model from the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, we predict that the detection of double-electron capture of ${}^{124}$Xe to the ground state of ${}^{124}$Te with LUX will have approximately 115 events, assuming a half-life of 2.9 $\times$ 10${}^{21}$ years. We conclude that measuring ${}^{124}$Xe 2$\nu$ double-electron capture to the ground state of ${}^{124}$Te can be performed more precisely with the proposed LUX-Zeplin (LZ) experiment.

5 pages, 5 figures, and 2 tables

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• Dark Matter Results from 225 Live Days of XENON100 Data
• Search for Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay in ${}^{136}$Xe with EXO-200
• The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment
• Observation of Two-Neutrino Double-Beta Decay in Xe-136 with EXO-200
• Measurement of the Double Beta Decay Half-life of 130Te with the NEMO-3 Detector
• Measurement of the half-life of the two-neutrino double beta decay of Ge-76 with the Gerda experiment
• LUXSim: A Component-Centric Approach to Low-Background Simulations
• The Majorana Demonstrator

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Neutrinoless Double-Electron Capture
• Two-neutrino double electron capture on ${}^{124}$Xe based on an effective theory and the nuclear shell model
• Improved search for two-neutrino double electron capture on ${}^{124}$Xe and ${}^{126}$Xe using particle identification in XMASS-I
• Search for Two-Neutrino Double Electron Capture of ${}^{124}$Xe with XENON100
• Limit on the Radiative Neutrinoless Double Electron Capture of ${}^{36}$Ar from GERDA Phase I
• Search for two-neutrino double electron capture on ${}^{124}$Xe with the XMASS-I detector
• A search for double-electron capture in 74Se using coincidence/anticoincidence gamma-ray spectrometry
• Search for two neutrino double electron capture of ${}^{124}$Xe and ${}^{126}$Xe in the full exposure of the LUX detector