2015/12/15 by B. Monreal, L. de Viveiros, Monreal, Benjamin +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) #Particle Detector Development and Performance #Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1512.04926
openalex publication_date 2015/12/15 · openalex created_date 2023/03/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this work, we present the concept for large low-background experiments in\nwhich an unusual gas mixture gas serves as a seamless, high-QE,\nnear-100 %-coverage photodetector for scintillation or cerenkov photons. We\nfill a large time projection chamber with a VUV scintillating gas, plus an\nunusually small admixture dopant gas with a low ionization threshhold (and a\nhigh ionization yield), akin to a highly-underquenched Penning mixture.\nScintillation photons travel far from a primary ionization site before\nconverting into photoionization electrons. Using standard TPC methods, we can\nseparately count both the primary ionization electrons (which occur along a\ndense track) and the scintillation-ionization electrons (which will occur over\na large spherical region) without the use of PMTs. The scheme is compatible\nwith very large detectors, in both two-phase and single-phase high pressure\nconfigurations. We discuss how the drift-axis position of an event can be\nreconstructed, and under what constraints we can expect stable gas gain\noperations. We propose some detectors illustrating how this scheme---both in\nconventional two-phase geometries, as well as in pressurized space in\nsolution-mined salt cavern---makes it possible to safely construct gas time\nprojection chambers of previously-unreachable target masses, capable of\nstudying dark matter, double beta decay, proton decay, and solar neutrinos;\nmore speculative gas mixtures might extend the technique to reactor and\ngeoneutrinos\n