Predicting Transport Effects of Scintillation Light Signals in Large-Scale Liquid Argon Detectors

Abstract

Liquid argon is being employed as a detector medium in neutrino physics and Dark Matter searches. A recent push to expand the applications of scintillation light in Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber neutrino detectors has necessitated the development of advanced methods of simulating this light. The presently available methods tend to be prohibitively slow or imprecise due to the combination of detector size and the amount of energy deposited by neutrino beam interactions. In this work we present a semi-analytical model to predict the quantity of argon scintillation light observed by a light detector with a precision better than $10\%$, based only on the relative positions between the scintillation and light detector. We also provide a method to predict the distribution of arrival times of these photons accounting for propagation effects. Additionally, we present an equivalent model to predict the number of photons and their arrival times in the case of a wavelength-shifting, highly-reflective layer being present on the detector cathode. Our proposed method can be used to simulate light propagation in large-scale liquid argon detectors such as DUNE or SBND, and could also be applied to other detector mediums such as liquid xenon or xenon-doped liquid argon.

23 pages, 27 figures, Accepted by EPJC

References in corpus (11)

• First Results from the DarkSide-50 Dark Matter Experiment at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
• First results from a Dark Matter search with liquid Argon at 87 K in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory
• Measurement of Scintillation and Ionization Yield and Scintillation Pulse Shape from Nuclear Recoils in Liquid Argon
• Evidence of delayed light emission of TetraPhenyl Butadiene excited by liquid Argon scintillation light
• Simulation of argon response and light detection in the DarkSide-50 dual phase TPC
• A measurement of the group velocity of scintillation light in liquid argon
• The Liquid Argon In A Testbeam (LArIAT) Experiment
• Pulse-shape discrimination and energy resolution of a liquid-argon scintillator with xenon doping
• Design and implementation of the new scintillation light detection system of ICARUS T600
• Expected performance of an ideal liquid argon neutrino detector with enhanced sensitivity to scintillation light
• Demonstration of photomultiplier tube operation at 29 K

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Wavelength shifters for applications in liquid argon detectors
• Scintillation Light in SBND: Simulation, Reconstruction, and Expected Performance of the Photon Detection System
• Doping Liquid Argon with Xenon in ProtoDUNE Single-Phase: Effects on Scintillation Light
• Performance of an Optical TPC Geant4 Simulation with Opticks GPU-Accelerated Photon Propagation