Intense Infrared Scintillation of Liquid Ar-Xe Mixtures

Abstract

Intense infrared (IR) light emission from liquid Ar-Xe mixtures has been observed using 12 keV electron-beam excitation. The emission peaks at a wavelength of 1.18 $\mu$m and the half-width of the emission band is 0.1 $\mu$m. Maximum intensity has been found for a 10 ppm xenon admixture in liquid argon. The conversion efficiency of electron beam-power to IR-light is about 1% (10000 photons per MeV electron energy deposited). A possible application of this intense IR emission for a new particle discrimination concept in liquid noble gas detectors is discussed. No light emission was found for perfectly purified liquid argon in the wavelength range from 0.5 to 3.5 $\mu$m on the current level of sensitivity.

arXiv comment5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (13)

• The XENON100 Dark Matter Experiment
• The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment
• The EXO-200 detector, part I: Detector design and construction
• Underground operation of the ICARUS T600 LAr-TPC: first results
• The scintillation of liquid argon
• ArDM: a ton-scale liquid Argon experiment for direct detection of Dark Matter in the Universe
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• Infrared scintillation yield in gaseous and liquid argon
• Attenuation of vacuum ultraviolet light in liquid argon
• Table-top setup for investigating the scintillation properties of liquid argon
• Ion-beam excitation of liquid argon
• Environment influence on the IR fluorescence of Xe${}_2^{\ast }$ molecules in electron beam excited Ar--Xe mixture at high density

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Measurement of the scintillation and ionization response of liquid xenon at MeV energies in the EXO-200 experiment
• Intense Vacuum-Ultraviolet and Infrared Scintillation of Liquid Ar-Xe Mixtures
• Attenuation of vacuum ultraviolet light in pure and xenon-doped liquid argon - an approach to an assignment of the near-infrared emission from the mixture
• Attenuation measurements of vacuum ultraviolet light in liquid argon revisited
• Near-infrared scintillation of liquid argon
• Study of visible-light emission in pure and methane-doped liquid argon
• Near-infrared scintillation of liquid argon: recent results obtained with the NIR facility at Fermilab