Scintillation and optical properties of xenon-doped liquid argon

Abstract

Liquid argon (LAr) is a common choice as detection medium in particle physics and rare-event searches. Challenges of LAr scintillation light detection include its short emission wavelength, long scintillation time and short attenuation length. The addition of small amounts of xenon to LAr is known to improve the scintillation and optical properties. We present a characterization campaign on xenon-doped liquid argon (XeDLAr) with target xenon concentrations ranging from 0 to 300 ppm by mass encompassing the measurement of the photoelectron yield $Y$ , effective triplet lifetime ${\tau }_3$ and effective attenuation length ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{att}}$. The measurements were conducted in the Subterranean Cryogenic ARgon Facility, SCARF, a 1 t (XeD)LAr test stand in the shallow underground laboratory (UGL) of TU-Munich. These three scintillation and optical parameters were observed simultaneously with a single setup, the Legend Liquid Argon Monitoring Apparatus, LLAMA. The actual xenon concentrations in the liquid and gaseous phases were determined with the Impurity DEtector For Investigation of Xenon, IDEFIX, a mass spectrometer setup, and successful doping was confirmed. At the highest dopant concentration we find a doubling of $Y$ , a tenfold reduction of ${\tau }_3$ to $\sim$ 90 ns and a tenfold increase of ${\lambda }_{att}$ to over 6 m.

References in corpus (7)

• Final Results of GERDA on the Search for Neutrinoless Double-$\beta$ Decay
• First Results from the DarkSide-50 Dark Matter Experiment at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
• Measurement of the specific activity of Ar-39 in natural argon
• Pulseshape discrimination against low-energy Ar-39 beta decays in liquid argon with 4.5 tonne-years of DEAP-3600 data
• Properties of Liquid Argon Scintillation Light Emission
• Pulse-shape discrimination and energy resolution of a liquid-argon scintillator with xenon doping
• Impact of xenon doping in the scintillation light in a large liquid-argon TPC

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Sensitivity projections for a dual-phase argon TPC optimized for light dark matter searches through the ionization channel
• Impact of extreme ultraviolet radiation on the scintillation of pure and xenon-doped liquid argon
• Snowmass Instrumentation Frontier IF08 Topical Group Report: Noble Element Detectors
• SBC-SNOLAB scintillation system and SiPM implementation for dark matter searches