Low Energy Electronic Recoils and Single Electron Detection with a Liquid Xenon Proportional Scintillation Counter

Abstract

Liquid xenon (LXe) is a well-studied detector medium to search for rare events in dark matter and neutrino physics. Two-phase xenon time projection chambers (TPCs) can detect electronic and nuclear recoils with energy down to kilo-electron volts (keV). In this paper, we characterize the response of a single-phase liquid xenon proportional scintillation counter (LXePSC), which produces electroluminescence directly in the liquid, to detect electronic recoils at low energies. Our design uses a thin (10 - 25 $\mu$m diameter), central anode wire in a cylindrical LXe target where ionization electrons, created from radiation particles, drift radially towards the anode, and electroluminescence is produced. Both the primary scintillation (S1) and electroluminescence (S2) are detected by photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) surrounding the LXe target. Up to 17 photons are produced per electron, obtained with a 10 $\mu$m diameter anode wire, allowing for the highly efficient detection of electronic recoils from beta decays of a tritium source down to roughly 1 keV. Single electrons, from photo-emission of the cathode wires, are observed at a gain of 1.8 photoelectrons (PE) per electron. The delayed signals following the S2 signals are dominated by single-photon-like hits, without evidence for electron signals observed in the two-phase xenon TPCs. We discuss the potential application of such a LXePSC for reactor neutrino detection via Coherent Elastic Neutrino Nucleus Scattering (CE$\nu$NS).

18 pages, 17 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Observation of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering
• First Dark Matter Search Results from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment
• Search for New Physics in Electronic Recoil Data from XENONnT
• Emission of Single and Few Electrons in XENON1T and Limits on Light Dark Matter
• XENON1T Dark Matter Data Analysis: Signal & Background Models, and Statistical Inference
• Measurements of proportional scintillation and electron multiplication in liquid xenon using thin wires
• Correlated Single- and Few-Electron Backgrounds Milliseconds after Interactions in Dual-Phase Liquid Xenon Time Projection Chambers
• Proposal of a Geiger-type Single-Phase Liquid Xenon Time Projection Chamber as Potential Detector Technique for Dark Matter Direct Search
• Performance of a Radial Time Projection Chamber with Electroluminescence in Liquid Xenon
• Prospects of charge signal analyses in liquid xenon TPCs with proportional scintillation in the liquid phase
• Study of dielectric breakdown in liquid xenon with the XeBrA experiment

Cited by in corpus (4)

• First observation of liquid xenon electroluminescence with a Microstrip Plate
• First observation of neutral bremsstrahlung electroluminescence in liquid argon
• Feasibility of Liquid-phase Xenon Proportional Scintillation for Low-energy Physics
• Design Challenges for a Future Liquid Xenon Observatory