|
The XENON dark matter research project operated at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory is a deep underground research facility featuring increasingly ambitious experiments aiming to finally detect long sought after dark matter particles. These particles in the form of Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are believed to be found by looking for rare interactions via nuclear recoils in a liquid xenon target chamber. The current detector consists of a dual phase Time projection chamber (TPC). The experiment detects scintillation and ionization produced when particles interact in the liquid xenon volume, to search for an excess of nuclear recoil events over known backgrounds. The detection of such a signal will provide the first direct experimental evidence for dark matter candidate particles. The collaboration is currently led by Italian professor of physics Elena Aprile from Columbia University. == Detector Principle == The XENON experiment operates a dual phase Time projection chamber (TPC), which utilizes a liquid xenon target with a gaseous phase on top. Two arrays of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), one at the top of the detector in the gaseous phase (GXe), and one at the bottom of the liquid layer (LXe), detect scintillation and electroluminescence light produced when charged particles interact in the detector. Electric fields are applied across both the liquid and gaseous phase of the detector. The electric field in the gaseous phase has to be sufficiently large to extract electrons from the liquid phase Particle interactions in the liquid target produce scintillation and ionization. The prompt scintillation light produces 178 nm ultraviolet photons. This signal is detected by the PMTs, and is referred to as the S1 signal. This technique has proved sensitive enough to detect single photoelectrons. The applied electric field prevents recombination of all the electrons produced from a charged particle interaction in the TPC. These electrons are drifted to the top of the liquid phase by the electric field. The ionization is then extracted into the gas phase by the stronger electric field in the gaseous phase. The electric field accelerates the electrons to the point that it creates a proportional scintillation signal that is also collected by the PMTs, and is referred to as the S2 signal. The detector allows for a full 3-D position determination of the particle interaction. Electrons in liquid xenon have a uniform drift velocity. This allows the interaction depth of the event to be determined by measuring the time delay between the S1 and S2 signal. The position of the event in the x-y plane can be determined by looking at the number of photons seen by each of the individual PMTs. The full 3-D position allows for the fiducialization of the detector, in which a low-background region is defined in the inner volume of the TPC. This fiducial volume has a greatly reduced rate of background events as compared to regions of the detector at the edge of the TPC, due to the self-shielding properties of liquid xenon. This allows for a much higher sensitivity when searching for very rare events. Charged particles moving through the detector are expected to either interact with the electrons of the xenon atoms producing electronic recoils, or with the nucleus, producing nuclear recoils. For a given amount of energy deposited by a particle interaction in the detector, the ratio of S2/S1 can be used as a discrimination parameter to distinguish electronic and nuclear recoil events. This ratio is expected to be greater for electronic recoils than for nuclear recoils. In this way backgrounds from electronic recoils can be suppressed by more than 99%, while simultaneously retaining 50% of the nuclear recoil events. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「XENON」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|