Aprile E, Dahl C E, de Viveiros L, Gaitskell R J, Giboni K L, Kwong J, Majewski P, Ni K, Shutt T, Yamashita M
Physics Department and Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2006 Aug 25;97(8):081302. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.081302.
We report the first measurements of the absolute ionization yield of nuclear recoils in liquid xenon, as a function of energy and electric field. Independent experiments were carried out with two dual-phase time-projection chamber prototypes, developed for the XENON dark matter project. We find that the charge yield increases with decreasing recoil energy, and exhibits only a weak field dependence. These results are the first unambiguous demonstration of the capability of dual-phase xenon detectors to discriminate between electron and nuclear recoils down to 20 keV, a key requirement for a sensitive dark matter search.
我们报告了液氙中核反冲绝对电离产额的首次测量结果，该结果是能量和电场的函数。我们使用为XENON暗物质项目开发的两个双相时间投影室原型进行了独立实验。我们发现，电荷产额随着反冲能量的降低而增加，并且仅表现出微弱的场依赖性。这些结果首次明确证明了双相氙探测器能够区分低至20 keV的电子反冲和核反冲，这是灵敏暗物质搜索的一项关键要求。
