A Dual-phase Xenon TPC for Scintillation and Ionisation Yield Measurements in Liquid Xenon

Abstract

A small-scale, two-phase (liquid/gas) xenon time projection chamber (Xurich II) was designed, constructed and is under operation at the University of Zurich. Its main purpose is to investigate the microphysics of particle interactions in liquid xenon at energies below 50 keV, which are relevant for rare event searches using xenon as target material. Here we describe in detail the detector, its associated infrastructure, and the signal identification algorithm developed for processing and analysing the data. We present the first characterisation of the new instrument with calibration data from an internal 83m-Kr source. The zero-field light yield is 15.0 and 14.0 photoelectrons/keV at 9.4 keV and 32.1 keV, respectively, and the corresponding values at an electron drift field of 1 kV/cm are 10.8 and 7.9 photoelectrons/keV. The charge yields at these energies are 28 and 31 electrons/keV, with the proportional scintillation yield of 24 photoelectrons per one electron extracted into the gas phase, and an electron lifetime of 200 $\mu$s. The relative energy resolution, $\sigma /E$, is 11.9 % and 5.8 % at 9.4 keV and 32.1 keV, respectively using a linear combination of the scintillation and ionisation signals. We conclude with measurements of the electron drift velocity at various electric fields, and compare these to literature values.

11 pages, 14 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• A Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics
• Characterisation of Silicon Photomultipliers for Liquid Xenon Detectors
• Measurement of the scintillation and ionization response of liquid xenon at MeV energies in the EXO-200 experiment
• The first dual-phase xenon TPC equipped with silicon photomultipliers and characterisation with ${}^{37}$Ar
• Characterization of alpha and beta interactions in liquid xenon
• Electron transport measurements in liquid xenon with Xenoscope, a large-scale DARWIN demonstrator
• Design and construction of Xenoscope -- a full-scale vertical demonstrator for the DARWIN observatory
• The XeBRA platform for liquid xenon time projection chamber development
• Analysis of ${}^{83m}$Kr Prompt Scintillation Signals in the PIXeY Detector
• Development of a Monte Carlo tool for simulating electron transport in noble liquids
• Light yield and field dependence measurement in PandaX-II dual-phase xenon detector