Light Production and Detection in Noble Liquid Detectors

Dear colleagues,

Over the last three to four decades the use of noble liquids as detection media has matured into a technology employed by currently working or planned detectors for neutrino physics, dark matter searches, medical imaging, among other applications.

Noble liquids are excellent scintillators transparent to their own light which, however, lies in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum that makes it hard to be detected with ordinary photodetectors. With wavelengths ranging from the extreme ultraviolet (EUV), such as for liquid helium (80 nm) and liquid neon (78 nm), up to the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) at 128 nm (liquid argon),  150 nm (liquid krypton) and 175 nm (liquid xenon), it is clear that  ingenious ideas are needed for its efficient detection.

Detecting this abundant scintillation light is an asset for most experiments using noble liquids as it provides complementary information to the ionization signal and in combination with the latter may improve the reconstruction of low energy events and allow for better particle identification.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collect contributions covering important issues on the production, propagation and detection of the scintillation light in noble liquids. These issues affect the performance of current and future planned detectors and include the precise determination of the Rayleigh scattering  and absorption lengths, the potential use of dopants in the noble liquid volume, as well as the more conventional use of passive or active elements coated with wavelength shifters. On the detection front, the new development of VUV sensitive photon devices as well as more efficient ways of capturing the scintillation light over large areas will also be addressed.

Papers on the following topics of light production, propagation and detection in noble liquids are welcomed:

• Atomic and molecular mechanisms of light production.
• Atomic collision processes in doped noble liquids.
• Rayleigh scattering in noble liquids.
• New ideas on wavelength shifters.
• VUV sensitive cryogenic detectors.
• New ideas for large area optical detectors.

Dr. Carlos O. Escobar
Guest Editor

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