The scintillation and ionization yield of liquid xenon for nuclear recoils

Understand

XENON10 is an experiment designed to directly detect particle dark matter.

• It is a dual phase (liquid/gas) xenon time-projection chamber with 3D position imaging.
• Particle interactions generate a primary scintillation signal (S1) and ionization signal (S2), which are both functions of the deposited recoil energy and the incident particle type.
• We present a new precision measurement of the relative scintillation yield \leff and the absolute ionization yield Q_y, for nuclear recoils in xenon.