2018/08/27 by R. Agnese, T. Aralis, T. Aramaki +94 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Particle Detector Development and Performance #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.5041457
openalex created_date 2018/06/01 · openalex publication_date 2018/08/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment at the Soudan Underground Laboratory studied energy loss associated with defect formation in germanium crystals at mK temperatures using in situ 210Pb sources. We examine the spectrum of 206Pb nuclear recoils near its expected 103 keV endpoint energy and determine an energy loss of (6:08 ± 0:18)%, which we attribute to defect formation. From this result and using TRIM simulations, we extract the first experimentally determined average displacement threshold energy of 19.7−0.5+0.6 eV for germanium. This has implications for the analysis thresholds of future germanium-based dark matter searches.