Erlangen 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 36: Search for Dark Matter II

T 36.4: Vortrag

Dienstag, 17. März 2026, 17:00–17:15, AM 00.014

Characterization of anomalous electron backgrounds in XENONnT — •Alexis Michel for the XENON collaboration — Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Astroparticle Physics

Dual-phase xenon time projection chambers like XENONnT are widely used in searches for rare events. These detectors have a layer of gaseous xenon (GXe) above a target of liquid xenon (LXe). Interactions in the LXe produce scintillation light and ionization electrons. With electric fields generated by electrodes, clouds of such ionization electrons are drifted upwards in the liquid and then extracted into the gas, where they produce a secondary proportional scintillation light signal.

Such xenon-based TPCs commonly see various forms of spurious emission that are associated with electrical fields and electrode operation. One such emission type are so-called e⁻-bursts that were observed in XENONnT and other detectors. These e⁻-bursts are large and clustered delayed electron signals observed where the extraction of the initial electron cloud at the LXe-GXe interface was incomplete and electrons got trapped at the LXe surface. Another such spurious emission type is from so-called hot-spots, which are spatially localized sources of continuous and intermittent single electron emission.

In this talk I will present the recent results on the studies of spurious electron emission phenomena in XENONnT and their implications for the next generation of xenon-based detectors such as XLZD.

This work has been supported in part by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) through the grant 05A23VK3 within the ErUM-Pro funding line.

Keywords: XENONnT; Dual-Phase Xenon TPC; Surface physics; Electrodes