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 $^{83m}$Kr internal conversion electrons is comparable to that from $^{207}$Bi conversion electrons, we obtained the numbers of excitons ($N_{ex}$) and ion pairs ($N_i$) and their ratio ($N_{ex}/N_i$) 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

Dark Matter in 3D

We discuss the relevance of directional detection experiments in the post-discovery era and propose a method to extract the local dark matter phase space distribution from directional data. The first feature of this method is a parameterization of the dark matter distribution function in terms of integrals of motion, which can be analytically extended to infer properties of the global distribution if certain equilibrium conditions hold. The second feature of our method is a decomposition of the distribution function in moments of a model independent basis, with minimal reliance on the ansatz for its functional form. We illustrate our method using the Via Lactea II N-body simulation as well as an analytical model for the dark matter halo. We conclude that O(1000) events are necessary to measure deviations from the Standard Halo Model and constrain or measure the presence of anisotropies.Comment: 36 pages, 13 figure

Measurement of the liquid argon energy response to nuclear and electronic recoils

International audienceA liquid argon time projection chamber, constructed for the Argon Response to Ionization and Scintillation (ARIS) experiment, is exposed to the highly collimated and quasimonoenergetic LICORNE neutron beam at the Institut de Physique Nucléaire d’Orsay (IPNO) in order to study the scintillation response to nuclear and electronic recoils. An array of liquid scintillator detectors, arranged around the apparatus, tag scattered neutrons and select nuclear recoil energies in the [7, 120] keV energy range. The relative scintillation efficiency of nuclear recoils is measured to high precision at null field, and the ion-electron recombination probability is extracted for a range of applied electric fields. Single-scattered Compton electrons, produced by gammas emitted from the deexcitation of Li*7 in coincidence with the beam pulse, along with calibration gamma sources, are used to extract the recombination probability as a function of energy and electron drift field. The ARIS results are compared with three recombination probability parametrizations (Thomas-Imel, Doke-Birks, and PARIS), allowing for the definition of a fully comprehensive model of the liquid argon response to nuclear and electronic recoils down to the few-keV range. The constraints provided by ARIS to the liquid argon response at low energy allow the reduction of systematics affecting the sensitivity of dark matter search experiments based on liquid argon

DarkSide: Latest results and future perspectives

DarkSide is direct-detection dark-matter experimental project based on radiopure argon. The main goal of the DarkSide program is the detection of rare nuclear elastic collisions with hypothetical dark-matter particles. The present detector, DarkSide-50, placed at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS), is a dualphase time projection chamber (TPC) filled with ultra-pure liquid argon, extracted from underground sources. Surrounding the TPC to suppress the background there are neutron and muon active vetoes. One of argon key features is the capability to distinguish between electron and nuclear recoils, exploiting the different shapes of the signals. DarkSide-50 new results, obtained using a live-days exposure of 532.4 days, are presented. This analysis sets a 90% C.L. upper limit on the dark matternucleon spin-independent cross-section of 1.1 × 10-44 cm2 for a WIMP mass of 100 GeV/c2. The next phase of the project, DarkSide-20k, will be a new detector with a fiducial mass of ∼ 20 tons, equipped with cryogenic silicon photomultipliers (SiPM)

Measurement of the ion fraction and mobility of 218Po produced in 222Rn decays in liquid argon

We report measurements of the charged daughter fraction of 218Po as a result of the 222Rn alpha decay, and the mobility of 218Po+ ions, using radon-polonium coincidences from the 238U chain identified in 532 live-days of DarkSide-50 WIMP-search data. The fraction of 218Po that is charged is found to be 0.37 ± 0.03 and the mobility of 218Po+ is (8.6 ± 0.1) × 10−4 cmVs2