Electron Drift and Longitudinal Diffusion in High Pressure Xenon-Helium Gas Mixtures

Abstract

We report new measurements of the drift velocity and longitudinal diffusion coefficients of electrons in pure xenon gas and in xenon-helium gas mixtures at 1-9 bar and electric field strengths of 50-300 V/cm. In pure xenon we find excellent agreement with world data at all $E/P$, for both drift velocity and diffusion coefficients. However, a larger value of the longitudinal diffusion coefficient than theoretical predictions is found at low $E/P$ in pure xenon, below the range of reduced fields usually probed by TPC experiments. A similar effect is observed in xenon-helium gas mixtures at somewhat larger $E/P$. Drift velocities in xenon-helium mixtures are found to be theoretically well predicted. Although longitudinal diffusion in xenon-helium mixtures is found to be larger than anticipated, extrapolation based on the measured longitudinal diffusion coefficients suggest that the use of helium additives to reduce transverse diffusion in xenon gas remains a promising prospect.

References in corpus (13)

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Electron Transport in Gaseous Detectors with a Python-based Monte Carlo Simulation Code
• Demonstration of the event identification capabilities of the NEXT-White detector
• Measurements of electron transport in liquid and gas Xenon using a laser-driven photocathode
• Double Beta Decay APPEC Committee Report
• Dielectric Strength of Noble and Quenched Gases for High Pressure Time Projection Chambers
• Mitigation of Backgrounds from Cosmogenic ${}^{137}$Xe in Xenon Gas Experiments using ${}^3$He Neutron Capture
• Radio Frequency and DC High Voltage Breakdown of High Pressure Helium, Argon, and Xenon
• A new amplification structure for time projection chambers based on electroluminescence
• Optimization of convolutional neural networks for background suppression in the PandaX-III experiment
• New Technologies for Discovery
• A new imaging technology based on Compton X-ray scattering
• A journey to ITACA: Ion Tracking with Ammonium Cations Apparatus