A Review of NEST Models for Liquid Xenon and Exhaustive Comparison to Other Approaches

Abstract

This paper will discuss the microphysical simulation of interactions in liquid xenon, the active detector medium in many leading rare-event searches for new physics, and describe experimental observables useful for understanding detector performance. The scintillation and ionization yield distributions for signal and background will be presented using the Noble Element Simulation Technique (NEST), which is a toolkit based on experimental data and simple, empirical formulae, which mimic previous microphysics modeling, but are guided by data. The NEST models for light and charge production as a function of the particle type, energy, and electric field will be reviewed, as well as models for energy resolution and final pulse areas. NEST will be compared to other models or sets of models, and vetted against real data, with several specific examples pulled from XENON, ZEPLIN, LUX, LZ, PandaX, and table-top experiments used for calibrations.

28 Pages, 4 Tables, 7 Figures, 21 Equations, and 131 References

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Dark Matter Search Results from 4.2 Tonne-Years of Exposure of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment
• WIMP Dark Matter Search using a 3.1 Tonne-Year Exposure of the XENONnT Experiment
• The XLZD Design Book: Towards the Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics
• Search for Light Dark Matter with 259-day data in PandaX-4T
• New constraints on cosmic ray-boosted dark matter from the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment
• Measurements and models of enhanced recombination following inner-shell vacancies in liquid xenon
• Electron-ion recombination in composite interactions in liquid xenon
• Light Dark Matter Search with 7.8 Tonne-Year of Ionization-Only Data in XENONnT
• GRANITE: Mechanical Characterization and Optical Inspection of Large-Area TPC Electrodes
• Probing the Solar ${}^8$B Neutrino Fog with XENONnT
• Quartz fluorescence backgrounds in xenon particle detectors