Spherical proportional counters; development, improvement and understanding

摘要

The New Experiments With Spheres-Gas (NEWS-G) collaboration uses spherical proportional counters (SPCs) filled with light noble gases for rare event detection. SPCs are a novel technology that have many appealing features for particle detection including sub-keV thresholds, single electron sensitivity, excellent energy resolution and flexibility in gas choice. In this paper, studies conducted at Queen's University, focusing on the understanding, monitoring and improvement of the detector response will be presented. The detector consists of a 30 cm diameter sphere with a 2 mm anode at the center. With this set-up, we perform precision measurements with a UV laser and radioactive sources that encompass a wide range of fundamental characteristics of the detector.