This Letter details a measurement of the ionization yield ($Q_y$) of 6.7 keV $^{40}Ar$ atoms stopping in a liquid argon detector. The $Q_y$ of 3.6-6.3 detected $e^{-}/mbox{keV}$, for applied electric fields in the range 240--2130 V/cm, is encouraging
for the use of this detector medium to search for the signals from hypothetical dark matter particle interactions and from coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering. A significant dependence of $Q_y$ on the applied electric field is observed and explained in the context of ion recombination.
For sufficiently wide resonances, nuclear resonance fluorescence behaves like elastic photo-nuclear scattering while retaining the large cross-section characteristic of resonant photo-nuclear absorption. We show that NRF may be used to characterize t
he signals produced by low-energy nuclear recoils by serving as a novel source of tagged low-energy nuclear recoils. Understanding these signals is important in determining the sensitivity of direct WIMP dark-matter and coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering searches.
