Anisotropic diffusion of electrons in liquid xenon with application to improving the sensitivity of direct dark matter searches

Understand

Electron diffusion in a liquid xenon time projection chamber has recently been used to infer the $z$ coordinate of a particle interaction, from the width of the electron signal.

• The goal of this technique is to reduce the background event rate by discriminating edge events from bulk events.
• Analyses of dark matter search data which employ it would benefit from increased longitudinal electron diffusion.
• We show that a significant increase is expected if the applied electric field is decreased.