Scintillation Efficiency for Low-Energy Nuclear Recoils in Liquid-Xenon Dark Matter Detectors

摘要

We perform a theoretical study of the scintillation efficiency in thelow-energy region crucial for liquid-xenon dark-matter detectors. We develop acomputer program to simulate the cascading process of the recoiling xenonnucleus in liquid xenon and calculate the nuclear quenching effect due toatomic collisions. We use the electronic stopping power extrapolated from theexperimental data to the low-energy region, and take into account the effectsof electrons escaping from the electron-ion pair recombination using thegeneralized Thomas-Imel model fitted to scintillation data. Our result agreeswell with the experiments from neutron scattering and vanishes rapidly as therecoiling energy drops below 3 keV.