Study of Argon Electroluminescence Light Yield using Data from DarkSide-50

Abstract

Since the secondary scintillation signals of dual phase Time Projection Chamber (TPC) detectors are produced through noble gas electroluminescence, a comprehensive understanding of electroluminescence is essential for the design and simulation of a future detector.

In this dissertation, I determine a fundamental property, the field dependence of light yield, of argon electroluminescence, using data from DarkSide-50 (DS-50), a detector designed for direct detection of dark matter.

The analysis requires a good understanding of the detector geometry in the secondary scintillation region of DS-50. However, deformations of the detector components are implied by the data, and they cannot be directly measured. I thus determine the field dependence under two hypotheses for the deformations. The results obtained by applying the different hypotheses have systematic differences, but are close to each other and agree with the results from other studies.

The results from this study are applied to predict the secondary scintillation light yield and its stability for different design schemes for DarkSide-20k (DS-20k), the next generation of DarkSide detector.