Paper

Calibration Plan for the SBC 10-kg Liquid Argon Detector with 100 eV Target Threshold

Alfonso-Pita, E, Lippincott, W H, Levine, I, Joseph, L, Mitra, B, Durnford, D, Baxter, D, Crisler, M, Westerdale, S, Windle, S, Sweeney, G, Dering, K, Whitis, T J, Kucich, A, Nicholson, O, Wyman, E, M -C Piro, Sheng, Z, Hawley-Herrera, H, Wright, A, Behnke, E, Harris, O, Zhang, R, Neilson, R, Vázquez-Jáuregui, E, Pyda, D, Corbett, J, Giampa, P, Putnam, G, Hall, J, Lamb, N, Laurin, M, Dahl, C E, Valdés-Martínez, O, de St Croix, A

2025

Overview

The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) Collaboration is designing a new generation of low background, noble liquid bubble chamber experiments with sub-keV nuclear recoil threshold. These experiments combine the electronic recoil blindness of a bubble chamber with the energy resolution of noble liquid scintillation, and maintain electron recoil discrimination at higher degrees of superheat (lower nuclear recoil thresholds) than Freon-based bubble chambers. A 10-kg liquid argon bubble chamber has the potential to set world leading limits on the dark matter nucleon cross-section for \\(O(\\mathrm{GeV}/c^{2})\\) masses, and to perform a high statistics coherent elastic neutrino nuclear scattering measurement with reactor neutrinos. This work presents a detailed calibration plan to measure the detector response of these experiments, combining photoneutron scattering with two new techniques to induce sub-keV nuclear recoils: nuclear Thomson scattering and thermal neutron capture.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Argon / Bubble chambers / Calibration / Chambers / Dark matter / Energy resolution / Neutrinos / Nuclear capture / Nuclear scattering / Recoil / Thermal neutrons / Thomson scattering