Article
Energy loss due to defect formation from 206Pb recoils in SuperCDMS germanium detectors
Physics
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-27-2018
Publisher
American Institute of Physics
Disciplines
Abstract
The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment (SuperCDMS) at the Soudan Underground Laboratory studied energy loss associated with Frenkel defect formation in germanium crystals at mK temperatures using in situ 210Pb sources. We examine the spectrum of 206Pb nuclear recoils near its expected 103 keV endpoint energy and determine an energy loss of (6.08±0.18) %, which we attribute to defect formation. From this result and using TRIM simulations, we extract the first experimentally determined average displacement threshold energy of (19.7+0.6−0.5) eV for germanium. This has implications for the analysis thresholds of future germanium-based dark matter searches.
Citation Information
Agnese, R., Aralis, T., Aramaki, T., Arnquist, I. J., Azadbakht, E., Baker, W., Banik, S., Barker, D., Bauer, D. A., Binder, T., Bowles, M. A., Brink, P. L., Bunker, R., Cabrera, B., Calkins, R., Cartaro, C., Cerdenõ, D. G., Chang, Y.-Y., Cooley, J., … Zhao, X. (2018). Energy loss due to defect formation from 206Pb recoils in SuperCDMS germanium detectors. Applied Physics Letters, 113(9), 092101. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5041457
Copyright © 2018 American Institute of Physics Publishing. Reprinted with permission.