A low-energy electronic recoil calibration of XENON1T, a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber, with an internal 37Ar source was performed. This calibration source features a 35-day half-life and ...provides two mono-energetic lines at 2.82 keV and 0.27 keV. The photon yield and electron yield at 2.82 keV are measured to be (32.3±0.3) photons/keV and (40.6±0.5) electrons/keV, respectively, in agreement with other measurements and with NEST predictions. The electron yield at 0.27 keV is also measured and it is (68.0+6.3−3.7) electrons/keV. The 37Ar calibration confirms that the detector is well-understood in the energy region close to the detection threshold, with the 2.82 keV line reconstructed at (2.83±0.02) keV, which further validates the model used to interpret the low-energy electronic recoil excess previously reported by XENON1T. The ability to efficiently remove argon with cryogenic distillation after the calibration proves that 37Ar can be considered as a regular calibration source for multi-tonne xenon detectors.
The XENON collaboration has published stringent limits on specific dark matter – nucleon recoil spectra from dark matter recoiling on the liquid xenon detector target. In this paper, we present an ...approximate likelihood for the XENON1T 1 t-year nuclear recoil search applicable to any nuclear recoil spectrum. Alongside this paper, we publish data and code to compute upper limits using the method we present. The approximate likelihood is constructed in bins of reconstructed energy, profiled along the signal expectation in each bin. This approach can be used to compute an approximate likelihood and therefore most statistical results for any nuclear recoil spectrum. Computing approximate results with this method is approximately three orders of magnitude faster than the likelihood used in the original publications of XENON1T, where limits were set for specific families of recoil spectra. Using this same method, we include toy Monte Carlo simulation-derived binwise likelihoods for the upcoming XENONnT experiment that can similarly be used to assess the sensitivity to arbitrary nuclear recoil signatures in its eventual 20 t-year exposure.
Abstract The selection of low-radioactive construction materials is of utmost importance for the success of low-energy rare event search experiments. Besides radioactive contaminants in the bulk, the ...emanation of radioactive radon atoms from material surfaces attains increasing relevance in the effort to further reduce the background of such experiments. In this work, we present the $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn emanation measurements performed for the XENON1T dark matter experiment. Together with the bulk impurity screening campaign, the results enabled us to select the radio-purest construction materials, targeting a $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn activity concentration of $$10\,\mathrm{\,}\upmu \mathrm{Bq}/\mathrm{kg}$$ 10 μ Bq / kg in $$3.2\,\mathrm{t}$$ 3.2 t of xenon. The knowledge of the distribution of the $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn sources allowed us to selectively eliminate problematic components in the course of the experiment. The predictions from the emanation measurements were compared to data of the $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn activity concentration in XENON1T. The final $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn activity concentration of $$(4.5\pm 0.1)\,\mathrm{\,}\upmu \mathrm{Bq}/\mathrm{kg}$$ ( 4.5 ± 0.1 ) μ Bq / kg in the target of XENON1T is the lowest ever achieved in a xenon dark matter experiment.
Abstract The selection of low-radioactive construction materials is of utmost importance for the success of low-energy rare event search experiments. Besides radioactive contaminants in the bulk, the ...emanation of radioactive radon atoms from material surfaces attains increasing relevance in the effort to further reduce the background of such experiments. In this work, we present the $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn emanation measurements performed for the XENON1T dark matter experiment. Together with the bulk impurity screening campaign, the results enabled us to select the radio-purest construction materials, targeting a $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn activity concentration of $$10\,\mathrm{\,}\upmu \mathrm{Bq}/\mathrm{kg}$$ 10 μ Bq / kg in $$3.2\,\mathrm{t}$$ 3.2 t of xenon. The knowledge of the distribution of the $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn sources allowed us to selectively eliminate problematic components in the course of the experiment. The predictions from the emanation measurements were compared to data of the $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn activity concentration in XENON1T. The final $$^{222}$$ 222 Rn activity concentration of $$(4.5\pm 0.1)\,\mathrm{\,}\upmu \mathrm{Bq}/\mathrm{kg}$$ ( 4.5 ± 0.1 ) μ Bq / kg in the target of XENON1T is the lowest ever achieved in a xenon dark matter experiment.
We report on a search for nuclear recoil signals from solar ^{8}B neutrinos elastically scattering off xenon nuclei in XENON1T data, lowering the energy threshold from 2.6 to 1.6 keV. We develop a ...variety of novel techniques to limit the resulting increase in backgrounds near the threshold. No significant ^{8}B neutrinolike excess is found in an exposure of 0.6 t×y. For the first time, we use the nondetection of solar neutrinos to constrain the light yield from 1-2 keV nuclear recoils in liquid xenon, as well as nonstandard neutrino-quark interactions. Finally, we improve upon world-leading constraints on dark matter-nucleus interactions for dark matter masses between 3 and 11 GeV c^{-2} by as much as an order of magnitude.
The selection of low-radioactive construction materials is of the utmost importance for rare-event searches and thus critical to the XENONnT experiment. Results of an extensive radioassay program are ...reported, in which material samples have been screened with gamma-ray spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, and \(^{222}\)Rn emanation measurements. Furthermore, the cleanliness procedures applied to remove or mitigate surface contamination of detector materials are described. Screening results, used as inputs for a XENONnT Monte Carlo simulation, predict a reduction of materials background (\(\sim\)17%) with respect to its predecessor XENON1T. Through radon emanation measurements, the expected \(^{222}\)Rn activity concentration in XENONnT is determined to be 4.2\(\,(^{+0.5}_{-0.7})\,\mu\)Bq/kg, a factor three lower with respect to XENON1T. This radon concentration will be further suppressed by means of the novel radon distillation system.
In this work, we expand on the XENON1T nuclear recoil searches to study the individual signals of dark matter interactions from operators up to dimension-eight in a Chiral Effective Field Theory ...(ChEFT) and a model of inelastic dark matter (iDM). We analyze data from two science runs of the XENON1T detector totaling 1\,tonne\(\times\)year exposure. For these analyses, we extended the region of interest from 4.9, 40.9\(\,\)keV\(_{\text{NR}}\) to 4.9, 54.4\(\,\)keV\(_{\text{NR}}\) to enhance our sensitivity for signals that peak at nonzero energies. We show that the data is consistent with the background-only hypothesis, with a small background over-fluctuation observed peaking between 20 and 50\(\,\)keV\(_{\text{NR}}\), resulting in a maximum local discovery significance of 1.7\,\(\sigma\) for the Vector\(\otimes\)Vector\(_{\text{strange}}\) (\(VV_s\)) ChEFT channel for a dark matter particle of 70\(\,\)GeV/c\(^2\), and \(1.8\,\sigma\) for an iDM particle of 50\(\,\)GeV/c\(^2\) with a mass splitting of 100\(\,\)keV/c\(^2\). For each model, we report 90\,\% confidence level (CL) upper limits. We also report upper limits on three benchmark models of dark matter interaction using ChEFT where we investigate the effect of isospin-breaking interactions. We observe rate-driven cancellations in regions of the isospin-breaking couplings, leading to up to 6 orders of magnitude weaker upper limits with respect to the isospin-conserving case.
The XENON collaboration has published stringent limits on specific dark matter -nucleon recoil spectra from dark matter recoiling on the liquid xenon detector target. In this paper, we present an ...approximate likelihood for the XENON1T 1 tonne-year nuclear recoil search applicable to any nuclear recoil spectrum. Alongside this paper, we publish data and code to compute upper limits using the method we present. The approximate likelihood is constructed in bins of reconstructed energy, profiled along the signal expectation in each bin. This approach can be used to compute an approximate likelihood and therefore most statistical results for any nuclear recoil spectrum. Computing approximate results with this method is approximately three orders of magnitude faster than the likelihood used in the original publications of XENON1T, where limits were set for specific families of recoil spectra. Using this same method, we include toy Monte Carlo simulation-derived binwise likelihoods for the upcoming XENONnT experiment that can similarly be used to assess the sensitivity to arbitrary nuclear recoil signatures in its eventual 20 tonne-year exposure.