1 research outputs found
Measurement of Scintillation and Ionization Yield and Scintillation Pulse Shape from Nuclear Recoils in Liquid Argon
We have measured the scintillation and ionization yield of recoiling nuclei
in liquid argon as a function of applied electric field by exposing a
dual-phase liquid argon time projection chamber (LAr-TPC) to a low energy
pulsed narrow band neutron beam produced at the Notre Dame Institute for
Structure and Nuclear Astrophysics. Liquid scintillation counters were arranged
to detect and identify neutrons scattered in the TPC and to select the energy
of the recoiling nuclei. We report measurements of the scintillation yields for
nuclear recoils with energies from 10.3 to 57.3 keV and for median applied
electric fields from 0 to 970 V/cm. For the ionization yields, we report
measurements from 16.9 to 57.3 keV and for electric fields from 96.4 to 486
V/cm. We also report the observation of an anticorrelation between
scintillation and ionization from nuclear recoils, which is similar to the
anticorrelation between scintillation and ionization from electron recoils.
Assuming that the energy loss partitions into excitons and ion pairs from
Kr internal conversion electrons is comparable to that from Bi
conversion electrons, we obtained the numbers of excitons () and ion
pairs () and their ratio () produced by nuclear recoils from
16.9 to 57.3 keV. Motivated by arguments suggesting direction sensitivity in
LAr-TPC signals due to columnar recombination, a comparison of the light and
charge yield of recoils parallel and perpendicular to the applied electric
field is presented for the first time.Comment: v2 to reflect published versio