Scintillation time dependence and pulse shape discrimination in liquid argon

Published

March 2, 2010

Author(s)

W. H. Lippincott, Kevin Coakley, D. Gastler, A. Hime, E. Kearns, D. N. McKinsey, J. A. Nikkel, L. C. Stonehill

Abstract

Using a single-phase liquid argon detector with a signal yield of 4.85 photoelectrons per keV of electronic-equivalent recoil energy (keVee), we measure the scintillation time dependence of both electronic and nuclear recoils in liquid argon down to 5 keVee. We develop two methods of pulse shape discrimination to distinguish between electronic and nuclear recoils. Using one of these methods, we measure a background and statistics-limited level of electronic recoil contamination to be 7.6e-07 between 60 and 128 keVr for a nuclear recoil acceptance of 50%, with no nuclear recoil-like events above 72 keVr. Finally, we develop a maximum likelihood method of pulse shape discrimination using the measured scintillation time dependence and predict the sensitivity to WIMP-nucleon scattering in three configurations of a liquid argon dark matter detector.

Citation

Physical Review C (Nuclear Physics)

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

argon, electronic recoil, nuclear recoil, pulse shape discrimination, scintillation light, stochastic modeling, time dependence.

Citation

Lippincott, W. , Coakley, K. , Gastler, D. , Hime, A. , Kearns, E. , McKinsey, D. , Nikkel, J. and Stonehill, L. (2010), Scintillation time dependence and pulse shape discrimination in liquid argon, Physical Review C (Nuclear Physics) (Accessed April 16, 2024)