ZE3RA: The ZEPLIN-III Reduction and Analysis Package

Understand

ZE3RA is the software package responsible for processing the raw data from the ZEPLIN-III dark matter experiment and its reduction into a set of parameters used in all subsequent analyses.

• The detector is a liquid xenon time projection chamber with scintillation and electroluminescence signals read out by an array of 31 photomultipliers.
• The dual range 62-channel data stream is optimised for the detection of scintillation pulses down to a single photoelectron and of ionisation signals as small as those produced by single electrons.
• We discuss in particular several strategies related to data filtering, pulse finding and pulse clustering which are tuned to recover the best electron/nuclear recoil discrimination near the detection threshold, where most dark matter elastic scattering signatures are expected.