Journal
ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS
Volume 30, Issue 1, Pages 12-17Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.astropartphys.2008.06.001
Keywords
Nuclear recoil; Dark matter detection; Relative scintillation efficiency
Funding
- Office of Research at University of South Dakota
- Laboratory Directed Research and Development at Los
- MOE of China [IRT0624]
- NSFC [10635020]
- Division Of Physics
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [758120] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Scintillation efficiency of low-energy nuclear recoils in noble liquids plays a crucial role in interpreting results from some direct searches for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter. However, the cause of a reduced scintillation efficiency relative to electronic recoils in noble liquids remains unclear at the moment. We attribute such a reduction of scintillation efficiency to two major mechanisms: (1) energy loss and (2) scintillation quenching. The former is commonly described by Lindhard's theory and the latter by Birk's saturation law. We propose to combine these two to explain the observed reduction of scintillation yield for nuclear recoils in noble liquids. Birk's constants kB for argon, neon and xenon determined from experimental data are used to predict noble liquid scintillator's response to low-energy nuclear recoils and low-energy electrons. We find that energy loss due to nuclear stopping power that contributes little to ionization and excitation is the dominant reduction mechanism in scintillation efficiency for nuclear recoils, but: that significant additional quenching results from the nonlinear response of scintillation to the ionization density. Published by Elsevier B.V.
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