Characterisation of NEXT-DEMO using xenon K${}_{\alpha }$ X-rays

Abstract

The NEXT experiment aims to observe the neutrinoless double beta decay of ${}^{136}$Xe in a high pressure gas TPC using electroluminescence (EL) to amplify the signal from ionization. Understanding the response of the detector is imperative in achieving a consistent and well understood energy measurement. The abundance of xenon k-shell x-ray emission during data taking has been identified as a multitool for the characterisation of the fundamental parameters of the gas as well as the equalisation of the response of the detector. The NEXT-DEMO prototype is a ~1.5 kg volume TPC filled with natural xenon. It employs an array of 19 PMTs as an energy plane and of 256 SiPMs as a tracking plane with the TPC light tube and SiPM surfaces being coated with tetraphenyl butadiene (TPB) which acts as a wavelength shifter for the VUV scintillation light produced by xenon. This paper presents the measurement of the properties of the drift of electrons in the TPC, the effects of the EL production region, and the extraction of position dependent correction constants using K${}_{\alpha }$ X-ray deposits. These constants were used to equalise the response of the detector to deposits left by gammas from ${}^{22}$Na.

References in corpus (2)

• The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment
• Initial results of NEXT-DEMO, a large-scale prototype of the NEXT-100 experiment

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Background rejection in NEXT using deep neural networks
• A Review of Basic Energy Reconstruction Techniques in Liquid Xenon and Argon Detectors for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics Using NEST
• Radiopurity assessment of the tracking readout for the NEXT double beta decay experiment
• Radiopurity assessment of the energy readout for the NEXT double beta decay experiment
• An improved measurement of electron-ion recombination in high-pressure xenon gas
• Application and performance of an ML-EM algorithm in NEXT
• Double Beta Decay Experiments at Canfranc Underground Laboratory
• High Pressure Gas Xenon TPCs for Double Beta Decay Searches