Study of light detection and sensitivity for a ton-scale liquid xenon dark matter detector

Abstract

Ton-scale liquid xenon detectors operated in two-phase mode are proposed and being constructed recently to explore the favored parameter space for the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) dark matter. To achieve a better light collection eff ciency while limiting the number of electronics channels compared to the previous generation detectors, large-size photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) such as the 3-inch-diameter R11410 from Hamamatsu are suggested to replace the 1-inch-square R8520 PMTs. In a two-phase xenon dark matter detector, two PMT arrays on the top and bottom are usually used. In this study, we compare the performance of two different ton-scale liquid xenon detector conf gurations with the same number of either R11410 (conf g.1) or R8520 (conf g.2) for the top PMT array, while both using R11410 PMTs for the bottom array.