First Demonstration of a Scintillating Xenon Bubble Chamber for Detecting Dark Matter and Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering

Understand

A 30-g xenon bubble chamber, operated at Northwestern University in June and November 2016, has for the first time observed simultaneous bubble nucleation and scintillation by nuclear recoils in a superheated liquid.

• This chamber is instrumented with a CCD camera for near-IR bubble imaging, a solar-blind photomultiplier tube to detect 175-nm xenon scintillation light, and a piezoelectric acoustic transducer to detect the ultrasonic emission from a growing bubble.
• The time of nucleation determined from the acoustic signal is used to correlate specific scintillation pulses with bubble-nucleating events.
• We report on data from this chamber for thermodynamic "Seitz" thresholds from 4.2 to 15.0 keV.