Liquid xenon calorimeter for MEG II experiment with VUV-sensitive MPPCs

The MEG II experiment is an upgrade of the MEG experiment to search for the charged lepton flavor violating decay of muon, mu(+)-> e(+)gamma. The MEG II experiment is expected to reach a branching ratio sensitivity of 4 x 10(-14), which is one order of magnitude better than the sensitivity of the current MEG experiment. The performance of the liquid xenon (LXe) gamma-ray detector will be greatly improved with a highly granular scintillation readout realized by replacing 216 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) on the gamma-ray entrance face with 4092 Multi-Pixel Photon Counters (MPPCs). For this purpose, we have developed a new type of MPPC which is sensitive to the LXe scintillation light in vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) range, in collaboration with Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. We have measured the performance of the MPPC in LXe, and an excellent performance has been confirmed including high photon detection efficiency (>15%) for LXe scintillation light. An excellent performance of the LXe detector has been confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations based on the measured properties of the MPPC. The construction of the detector is in progress, aiming to start physics data taking in 2017. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.