Nucleation efficiency of nuclear recoils in bubble chambers

Abstract

Bubble chambers using liquid xenon (and liquid argon) have been operated (resp. planned) by the Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration for GeV-scale dark matter searches and CE$\nu$NS from reactors. This will require a robust calibration program of the nucleation efficiency of low-energy nuclear recoils in these target media. Such a program has been carried out by the PICO collaboration, which aims to directly detect dark matter using ${\mathrm{C}}_3{\mathrm{F}}_8$ bubble chambers. Neutron calibration data from mono-energetic neutron beam and Am-Be source has been collected and analyzed, leading to a global fit of a generic nucleation efficiency model for carbon and fluorine recoils, at thermodynamic thresholds of $2.45$ and $3.29\mathrm{keV}$. Fitting the many-dimensional model to the data ($34$ free parameters) is a non-trivial computational challenge, addressed with a custom Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach, which will be presented. Parametric MC studies undertaken to validate this methodology are also discussed. This fit paradigm demonstrated for the PICO calibration will be applied to existing and future scintillating bubble chamber calibration data.

6 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Dark Matter Search Results from the Complete Exposure of the PICO-60 C${}_3$F${}_8$ Bubble Chamber
• Dark Matter Search Results from the PICO-2L C${}_3$F${}_8$ Bubble Chamber

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Results on photon-mediated dark matter-nucleus interactions from the PICO-60 C${}_3$F${}_8$ bubble chamber
• New Physics searches in a low threshold scintillating argon bubble chamber measuring coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering in reactors
• Model for bubble nucleation efficiency of low-energy nuclear recoils in bubble chambers for dark matter detection
• Absorption of Fermionic Dark Matter in the PICO-60 C${}_3$F${}_8$ Bubble Chamber