A new design for the anode of a time projection chamber, consisting of a
charge-detecting "tile", is investigated for use in large scale liquid xenon
detectors. The tile is produced by depositing 60 orthogonal metal
charge-collecting strips, 3~mm wide, on a 10~\si{\cm} × 10~\si{\cm}
fused-silica wafer. These charge tiles may be employed by large detectors, such
as the proposed tonne-scale nEXO experiment to search for neutrinoless
double-beta decay. Modular by design, an array of tiles can cover a sizable
area. The width of each strip is small compared to the size of the tile, so a
Frisch grid is not required. A grid-less, tiled anode design is beneficial for
an experiment such as nEXO, where a wire tensioning support structure and
Frisch grid might contribute radioactive backgrounds and would have to be
designed to accommodate cycling to cryogenic temperatures. The segmented anode
also reduces some degeneracies in signal reconstruction that arise in
large-area crossed-wire time projection chambers. A prototype tile was tested
in a cell containing liquid xenon. Very good agreement is achieved between the
measured ionization spectrum of a 207Bi source and simulations that
include the microphysics of recombination in xenon and a detailed modeling of
the electrostatic field of the detector. An energy resolution σ/E=5.5\%
is observed at 570~\si{keV}, comparable to the best intrinsic ionization-only
resolution reported in literature for liquid xenon at 936~V/\si{cm}.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, as publishe
