Scintillation yield from electronic and nuclear recoils in superfluid ${}^4$He

Abstract

Superfluid ${}^4$He is a promising target material for direct detection of light ($<$ 1 GeV) dark matter. Possible signal channels available for readout in this medium include prompt photons, triplet excimers, and roton and phonon quasiparticles. The relative yield of these signals has implications for the sensitivity and discrimination power of a superfluid ${}^4$He dark matter detector. Using a 16~cm${}^3$ volume of 1.75~K superfluid ${}^4$He read out by six immersed photomultiplier tubes, we measured the scintillation from electronic recoils ranging between 36.3 and 185 keV${}_{\mathrm{ee}}$, yielding a mean signal size of $1.25_{-0.03}^{+0.03}$~phe/keV${}_{\mathrm{ee}}$, and nuclear recoils from 53.2 to 1090 keV${}_{\mathrm{nr}}$. We compare the results of our relative scintillation yield measurements to an existing semiempirical model based on helium-helium and electron-helium interaction cross sections. We also study the behavior of delayed scintillation components as a function of recoil type and energy, a further avenue for signal discrimination in superfluid ${}^4$He.

arXiv comment17 pages, 19 figures

References in corpus (17)

• Prospects for measuring coherent neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering at a stopped-pion neutrino source
• Non-Appearance of Vortices in Fast Mechanical Expansions of Liquid 4He Through the Lambda Transition
• Magnetic Trapping of Neutrons
• A Path to the Direct Detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter Using Calorimetric Readout of a Superfluid ${}^4$He Target
• A Concept for A Dark Matter Detector Using Liquid Helium-4
• A New Cryogenic Apparatus to Search for the Neutron Electric Dipole Moment
• Evidence of delayed light emission of TetraPhenyl Butadiene excited by liquid Argon scintillation light
• Dark Matter Detection Using Helium Evaporation and Field Ionization
• Measurements of the intrinsic quantum efficiency and absorption length of tetraphenyl butadiene thin films in the vacuum ultraviolet regime
• Effect of an electric field on superfluid helium scintillation produced by alpha-particle sources
• Potentialities of a low-energy detector based on ${}^4$He evaporation to observe atomic effects in coherent neutrino scattering and physics perspectives
• Scintillation of Liquid Helium for Low-Energy Nuclear Recoils
• Charge Distribution about an Ionizing Electron Track in Liquid Helium
• Exact Solution for Vortex Dynamics in Temperature Quenches of Two-Dimensional Superfluids
• Effect of an electric field on liquid helium scintillation produced by fast electrons
• Scintillation and charge extraction from the tracks of energetic electrons in superfluid helium-4
• Cryogenic phonon-scintillation detectors with PMT readout for rare event search experiments

Cited by in corpus (10)

• A Review of NEST Models for Liquid Xenon and Exhaustive Comparison to Other Approaches
• First Demonstration of the HeRALD Superfluid Helium Detector Concept
• Detection and Calibration of Low-Energy Nuclear Recoils for Dark Matter and Neutrino Scattering Experiments
• Dark Matter-Electron Scattering Search Using Cryogenic Light Detectors
• Characterization of FBK NUV-HD-Cryo SiPMs near LHe temperature
• A portable and high intensity 24 keV neutron source based on ${}^{124}$Sb-${}^9$Be photoneutrons and an iron filter
• A novel nuclear recoil calibration for liquid noble gas detectors
• Response of a Liquid ${}^3$He Neutron Detector
• Signal partitioning in superfluid ${}^4$He: a Monte Carlo approach
• Liquid ${}^3$He Detectors for Neutrons