Energy, vertex, and time response of a LiquidO detector with an opaque-scintillator target to Compton-tagged electrons

Abstract

LiquidO detectors confine scintillation light near its point of production by stochastic scattering in an opaque medium and collect it with a lattice of wavelength-shifting (WLS) fibers. The elementary signal of such a detector is the point-like sub-MeV energy deposition, yet the response to that signal at the center of the detector volume has not been measured against an event-by-event ground truth. To close this gap, we couple BPULSE, a 4-liter prototype LiquidO detector, to a Compton-coincidence calibration setup that selects electron recoils of known energy on a constrained beam axis. The prototype is a 160 mm cube of opaque scintillator with 64 WLS fibers in alternating orthogonal layers at a 20 mm pitch, read out by silicon photomultipliers. Compton scatters of collimated gamma-ray beams from $^{137}$Cs and $^{60}$Co sources are tagged by a NaI(Tl) spectrometer. For 373.4 keV electrons, tagged from $90^{\circ}$ scatters of the $^{137}$Cs beam, the detector collects $19.04 \pm 0.07$ photoelectrons (p.e.). Across four operating points, the two sources at two scattering angles, it responds linearly at $48.3 \pm 1.5$ p.e./MeV. The energy resolution of $(23.4 \pm 0.4)\%$ matches the Poisson statistics of the detected photoelectrons. Collection at both fiber ends and larger sensors would raise the light yield of this target to an estimated 108-124 p.e./MeV. Center-of-mass reconstruction locates each recoil to the width of the delivered 20 mm beam spot, which bounds the intrinsic localization of the detector from above. The arrival time response sets a lower bound of 1.5 ns on the single-scatter start time at the observed $\approx 19$ p.e. light level. This single-scatter response is the building block for reconstructing multi-site events. It constrains the light collection, confinement, and timing models on which reconstruction in future LiquidO detectors will rest.