A coherent understanding of low-energy nuclear recoils in liquid xenon

Understand

Liquid xenon detectors such as XENON10 and XENON100 obtain a significant fraction of their sensitivity to light (<10 GeV) particle dark matter by looking for nuclear recoils of only a few keV, just above the detector threshold.

• Yet in this energy regime a correct treatment of the detector threshold and resolution remains unclear.
• The energy dependence of the scintillation yield of liquid xenon for nuclear recoils also bears heavily on detector sensitivity, yet numerous measurements have not succeeded in obtaining concordant results.
• In this article we show that the ratio of detected ionization to scintillation can be leveraged to constrain the scintillation yield.