Enhancement of NEST Capabilities for Simulating Low-Energy Recoils in Liquid Xenon

Understand

The Noble Element Simulation Technique (NEST) is an exhaustive collection of models explaining both the scintillation light and ionization yields of noble elements as a function of particle type (nuclear recoil, electron recoil, alphas), electric field, and incident energy or energy loss dE/dx.

• It is packaged as C++ code for Geant4 that implements said models, overriding the default model which does not account for certain complexities, such as the reduction in yields for nuclear recoils (NR) compared to electron recoils (ER).
• We present here improvements to the existing NEST models and updates to the code which make the package even more realistic and turn it into a more full-fledged Monte Carlo simulation.
• All available liquid xenon data on NR and ER to date have been taken into consideration in arriving at the current models.