Alexander Fieguth Münster

Internal calibration of dual-phase xenon TPCs with Krypton-83m(pdf)

Noble gas dual-phase TPCs are one of the most used detectortechnology for direct dark matter search. One of the leading experiments is the XENON Dark Matter Project. Its next generation stage XENON1T increases the target mass to 3.3 tons of LXe, which leads to challenges for the necessary calibration of the detector. While for small TPCs external calibration is feasible, the next generation needs internal calibration due to the self-shielding capability of the xenon detector material. A suitable source for internal calibration is Kr-83m, which decays over internal conversion (IC) producing mono-energetic electrons of 32 and 9 keV. Its advantageous half-life of 1.83h makes it useful, since it´s long enough to be spread uniformly within a TPC, but decays fast enough to avoid long-term contamination of the particle detectors. Within this talk different aspects of this type of calibration will be presented using the XENON100 detector and a dual-phase TPC in the laboratory in Muenster.