A novel nuclear recoil calibration for liquid noble gas detectors

Abstract

According to many dark matter models, a potential signal registered in a detector would feature a single-scattering nuclear recoil (NR). So, it is crucial to calibrate the detector's response to NR events. The conventional calibrations implement $\sim$ keV to MeV neutrons, which can be produced by an accelerator, a neutron generator, or a radioactive source. Although the calibrating methods have been widely employed, they could be improved in several ways: (a) the incident neutron energy should be more monoenergetic, (b) the calibrating NR energy should line up with the region of interest (ROI) of the experiment, and (c) the intensity of the beam should be appropriate. In the paper, we introduce a novel NR calibration method for liquid helium detectors, in which a helium beam ($\alpha$ particles) will be implemented to calibrate the detectors. The helium beam can (i) be tuned precisely to have a jitter of $\lesssim $ 4\% (the $\alpha$ beam's kinetic energy is equivalent to the recoil energy in the conventional calibrations with fast neutrons); (ii) have an energy between $\sim$ 100 eV and tens of keV; and (iii) provide a tunable flux from nA to 100 $\mu$A, which presents convenience in beam pipe configuration to obtain a $\sim$ 100 Hz events rate so that the events pileup would be ignorable.