A measurement of the mean electronic excitation energy of liquid xenon

Journal article

Liquid xenon is a leader in rare-event physics searches. Accurate modeling of charge and light production is key for simulating signals and backgrounds in this medium. The signal- and background-production models in the Noble Element Simulation Technique (NEST) are presented. NEST is a simulation toolkit based on experimental data, fit using simple, empirical formulae for the average charge and light yields and their variations. NEST also simulates the final scintillation pulses and exhibits the correct energy resolution as a function of the particle type, the energy, and the electric fields. After vetting of NEST against raw data, with several specific examples pulled from XENON, ZEPLIN, LUX/LZ, and PandaX, we interpolate and extrapolate its models to draw new conclusions on the properties of future detectors (e.g., XLZD's), in terms of the best possible discrimination of electron(ic) recoil backgrounds from a potential nuclear recoil signal, especially WIMP dark matter. We discover that the oft-quoted value of 99.5% discrimination is overly conservative, demonstrating that another order of magnitude improvement (99.95% discrimination) can be achieved with a high photon detection efficiency (g1 ~ 15-20%) at reasonably achievable drift fields of 200-350 V/cm.Comment: 24 Pages, 6 Tables, 15 Figures, and 15 Equation

Authors: Baudis, L; Sanchez-Lucas, P; Thieme, K

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SpringerOpen
• Journal: The European Physical Journal C
• Volume: 81
• Issue: 12
• Article number: 1060
• Publication date: 2021-12-01
• DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09834-x
• EISSN: 1434-6052
• ISSN: 1434-6044
• Language: English