Analysis of ${}^{83m}$Kr Prompt Scintillation Signals in the PIXeY Detector

Abstract

Prompt scintillation signals from ${}^{83m}$Kr calibration sources are a useful metric to calibrate the spatial variation of light collection efficiency and electric field magnitude of a two phase liquid-gas xenon time projection chamber. Because ${}^{83m}$Kr decays in two steps, there are two prompt scintillation pulses for each calibration event, denoted S1a and S1b. We study the ratio of S1b to S1a signal sizes in the Particle Identification in Xenon at Yale (PIXeY) experiment and its dependence on the time separation between the two signals ($\Delta t$), notably its increase at low $\Delta t$. In PIXeY data, the $\Delta t$ dependence of S1b/S1a is observed to exhibit two exponential components: one with a time constant of $0.05\pm 0.02\mu s$, which can be attributed to processing effects and pulse overlap and one with a time constant of $10.2\pm 2.2\mu s$ that increases in amplitude with electric drift field, the origin of which is not yet understood.

arXiv commentVersion edits: corrected typos and references, revised values presented in section 5.1, analysis conclusion is unchanged

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• A Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics
• Discrimination of electronic recoils from nuclear recoils in two-phase xenon time projection chambers
• Characterization of alpha and beta interactions in liquid xenon
• Gamma-ray energies and intensities observed in decay chain ${}^{83}Rb$/${}^{83m}Kr$/${}^{83}Kr$
• Light yield and field dependence measurement in PandaX-II dual-phase xenon detector