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Scintillation light produced in liquid argon (LAr) must be shifted from 128 nm to visible wavelengths in light detection systems used for liquid argon time-projection chambers (LArTPCs). To date, LArTPC light collection systems have employed tetraphenyl butadiene (TPB) coatings on photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) or plates placed in front of the PMTs. Recently, a new approach using TPB-coated light guides was proposed. In this paper, we report on light guides with improved attenuation lengths above 100 cm when measured in air. This is an important step in the development of meter-scale light guides for future LArTPCs. Improvements come from using a new acrylic-based coating, diamond-polished cast UV transmitting acrylic bars, and a hand-dipping technique to coat the bars. We discuss a model for connecting bar response in air to response in liquid argon and compare this to data taken in liquid argon. The good agreement between the prediction of the model and the measured response in liquid argon demonstrates that characterization in air is sufficient for quality control of bar production. This model can be used in simulations of light guides for future experiments.
The use of xenon-doped liquid argon is a promising alternative for large pure liquid-argon TPCs. Not only xenon-doped liquid argon enhances the light production, mitigating the possible suppression due to impurities, but also it increases the wavelength of the scintillation light, enlarging the effective Rayleigh scattering length and improving the detection uniformity. ProtoDUNE Dual-Phase is a 300-ton active volume LAr TPC, a prototype for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a dual-site experiment for long-baseline neutrino oscillation studies, neutrino astrophysics and nucleon decay searches. ProtoDUNE Dual-Phase took cosmic muon data at CERN with pure liquid argon and with xenon-doped liquid argon for over a year. The impact of the presence of xenon in the scintillation light and its comparison with the pure liquid argon data will be presented. These results are of interest to any future large LAr TPCs.
A Geant4-based Monte Carlo package named G4DS has been developed to simulate the response of DarkSide-50, an experiment operating since 2013 at LNGS, designed to detect WIMP interactions in liquid argon. In the process of WIMP searches, DarkSide-50 has achieved two fundamental milestones: the rejection of electron recoil background with a power of ~10^7, using the pulse shape discrimination technique, and the measurement of the residual 39Ar contamination in underground argon, ~3 orders of magnitude lower with respect to atmospheric argon. These results rely on the accurate simulation of the detector response to the liquid argon scintillation, its ionization, and electron-ion recombination processes. This work provides a complete overview of the DarkSide Monte Carlo and of its performance, with a particular focus on PARIS, the custom-made liquid argon response model.
Liquid argon is used as active medium in a variety of neutrino and Dark Matter experiments thanks to its excellent properties of charge yield and transport and as a scintillator. Liquid argon scintillation photons are emitted in a narrow band of 10~nm centered around 127 nm and with a characteristic time profile made by two components originated by the decay of the lowest lying singlet and triplet state of the excimer Ar$_2^*$ to the dissociative ground state. A model is proposed which takes into account the quenching of the long lived triplet states through the self-interaction with other triplet states or through the interaction with molecular Ar$_2^+$ ions. The model predicts the time profile of the scintillation signals and its dependence on the intensity of an external electric field and on the density of deposited energy, if the relative abundance of the unquenched fast and slow components is know. The model successfully explains the experimentally observed dependence of the characteristic time of the slow component on the intensity of the applied electric field and the increase of photon yield of liquid argon when doped with small quantities of xenon (at the ppm level). The model also predicts the dependence of the pulse shape parameter, F$_{prompt}$, for electron and nuclear recoils on the recoil energy and the behavior of the relative light yield of nuclear recoils in liquid argon, $mathcal{L}_{eff}$
Scintillation from noble gases is an important technique in particle physics including neutrino beam experiments, neutrino-less double beta-decay and dark matter searches. In liquid argon, the possibility of enhancing the light yield by the addition of a small quantity of xenon (doping at 10-1000 ppm) has been of particular interest. While the pathway for energy transfer between argon and xenon excimers is well known, the time-dependence of the process has not been fully studied in the context of a physics-based model. In this paper we present a model of the energy transfer process together with a fit to xenon-doped argon data. We have measured the diffusion limited rate constant as a function of xenon dopant. We find that the time dependence of the energy transfer is consistent with diffusion-limited reactions. Additionally, we find that commercially obtained argon can have a small xenon component (4 ppm). Our result will facilitate the use of xenon-doped liquid argon in future experiments.
Neutrinos are particles that interact rarely, so identifying them requires large detectors which produce lots of data. Processing this data with the computing power available is becoming more difficult as the detectors increase in size to reach their physics goals. In liquid argon time projection chambers (TPCs) the charged particles from neutrino interactions produce ionization electrons which drift in an electric field towards a series of collection wires, and the signal on the wires is used to reconstruct the interaction. The MicroBooNE detector currently collecting data at Fermilab has 8000 wires, and planned future experiments like DUNE will have 100 times more, which means that the time required to reconstruct an event will scale accordingly. Modernization of liquid argon TPC reconstruction code, including vectorization, parallelization and code portability to GPUs, will help to mitigate these challenges. The liquid argon TPC hit finding algorithm within the texttt{LArSoft}xspace framework used across multiple experiments has been vectorized and parallelized. This increases the speed of the algorithm on the order of ten times within a standalone version on Intel architectures. This new version has been incorporated back into texttt{LArSoft}xspace so that it can be generally used. These methods will also be applied to other low-level reconstruction algorithms of the wire signals such as the deconvolution. The applications and performance of this modernized liquid argon TPC wire reconstruction will be presented.