Measurement of the absolute reflectance of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) immersed in liquid xenon

Abstract

The performance of a detector using liquid xenon (LXe) as a scintillator is strongly dependent on the collection efficiency for xenon scintillation light, which in turn is critically dependent on the reflectance of the surfaces that surround the active volume. To improve the light collection in such detectors the active volume is usually surrounded by polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) reflector panels, used due to its very high reflectance -- even at the short wavelength of scintillation light of LXe (peaked at $178\text{nm}$). In this work, which contributed to the overall R\&D effort towards the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, we present experimental results for the absolute reflectance of three different PTFE samples (including the material used in the LUX detector) immersed in LXe for its scintillation light. The obtained results show that very high bi-hemispherical reflectance values ($\ge 97$%) can be achieved, enabling very low energy thresholds in liquid xenon scintillator-based detectors.

References in corpus (3)

• The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment
• Liquid noble gas detectors for low energy particle physics
• Radiogenic and Muon-Induced Backgrounds in the LUX Dark Matter Detector

Cited by in corpus (11)

• The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment
• Simulations of Events for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter Experiment
• Performance of novel VUV-sensitive Silicon Photo-Multipliers for nEXO
• Reflectivity and PDE of VUV4 Hamamatsu SiPMs in Liquid Xenon
• R&D of Wavelength-Shifting Reflectors and Characterization of the Quantum Efficiency of Tetraphenyl Butadiene and Polyethylene Naphthalate in Liquid Argon
• Calibration Strategy of the JUNO-TAO Experiment
• Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay Sensitivity of the XLZD Rare Event Observatory
• GPU-based optical simulation of the DARWIN detector
• Scintillation decay-time constants for alpha particles and electrons in liquid xenon
• VUV Transmission of PTFE for Xenon-based Particle Detectors
• High Voltage Delivery and Distribution for the NEXT-100 Time Projection Chamber