Direct comparison of PEN and TPB wavelength shifters in a liquid argon detector

Abstract

A large number of particle detectors employ liquid argon as their target material owing to its high scintillation yield and its ability to drift ionization charge over large distances. Scintillation light from argon is peaked at 128 nm and a wavelength shifter is required for its efficient detection. In this work, we directly compare the light yield achieved in two identical liquid argon chambers, one of which is equipped with PolyEthylene Naphthalate (PEN) and the other with TetraPhenyl Butadiene (TPB) wavelength shifter. Both chambers are lined with enhanced specular reflectors and instrumented with SiPMs with a coverage fraction of approximately 1%, which represents a geometry comparable to the future large scale detectors. We measured the light yield of the PEN chamber to be 39.4$\pm$0.4(stat)$\pm$1.9(syst)% of the yield of the TPB chamber. Using a Monte Carlo simulation this result is used to extract the wavelength shifting efficiency of PEN relative to TPB equal to 47.2$\pm$5.7%. This result paves the way for the use of easily available PEN foils as a wavelength shifter, which can substantially simplify the construction of future liquid argon detectors.

arXiv comment7 pages, 7 figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• R&D of Wavelength-Shifting Reflectors and Characterization of the Quantum Efficiency of Tetraphenyl Butadiene and Polyethylene Naphthalate in Liquid Argon
• SiPM cross-talk in liquid argon detectors
• Very large SiPM arrays with aggregated output
• Production and validation of scintillating structural components from low-background Poly(ethylene naphthalate)
• Optical properties of low background PEN structural components for the LEGEND-200 experiment
• Development and characterization of a slow wavelength shifting coating for background rejection in liquid argon detectors
• FAT-GEMs: (Field Assisted) Transparent Gaseous-Electroluminescence Multipliers
• Cryogenic setup for the characterization of wavelength-shifting materials for noble element radiation detectors
• Performance of an Optical TPC Geant4 Simulation with Opticks GPU-Accelerated Photon Propagation
• Demonstration of the light collection stability of a PEN-based wavelength shifting reflector in a tonne scale liquid argon detector
• Development of wavelength-shifting PEN foils for next generation experiments
• Snowmass Instrumentation Frontier IF08 Topical Group Report: Noble Element Detectors
• New candidate polymeric wavelength shifters for noble liquid detectors