Abstract
Inorganic crystal scintillators play a crucial role in particle detection for various applications in fundamental physics and applied science. The use of such materials as scintillating bolometers, which operate at temperatures as low as 10 mK and detect both heat (phonon) and scintillation signals, significantly extends detectors performance compared to the conventional scintillation counters. In particular, such low-temperature devices offer a high energy resolution in a wide energy interval thanks to a phonon signal detection, while a simultaneous registration of scintillation emitted provides an efficient particle identification tool. This feature is of great importance for a background identification and rejection. Combined with a large variety of elements of interest, which can be embedded in crystal scintillators, scintillating bolometers represent powerful particle detectors for rare-event searches (e.g., rare alpha and beta decays, double-beta decay, dark matter particles, neutrino detection). Here, we review the features and results of low-temperature scintillation detection achieved over a 30-year history of developments of scintillating bolometers and their use in rare-event search experiments.
Highlights
A commonly used particle identification parameter of scintillating bolometers is the ratio between a scintillation light signal measured by an light detectors (LDs) to an energy release in the cryogenic scintillator detected as a heat, the so-called light-to-heat ratio, L/H. (This parameter is often called as “light yield”, but such term can be confused with the absolute scintillation yield.) An illustration of the L/H parameter versus the particle energy extracted from the scintillating bolometer data [74] is shown in Figure 3
One detector module based on a small LiAlO2 crystal (20 × 10 × 5 mm, 2.8 g, Cz growth) with an NTD readout was tested aboveground with a CRESST-III LD instrumented with a TES sensor. (A twin sample with a TES directly deposited on the crystal was operated too, but without LD.) Another module was investigated at LNGS
Active developments of scintillating bolometers have been ongoing over the past three decades aiming at the implementation of low-temperature particle detectors for rareevent searches and/or for a background control in these experiments
Summary
Rare-event search experiments face a common challenge in the suppression of different sources of background which can hide or mimic signals searched for. A composite device based on a cryogenic scintillator and a photodetector (scintillating bolometer)—originally proposed about 30 years ago [3]—represents one of the most exploitable experimental techniques to identify particles interacting with a bolometric detector. The particle-dependent difference in the scintillation light output is often presented as the ratio of a light yield of ions to that of electrons (quenching factor for ions, QFi), which has the following approximate relation with the Birks’ factor and the stopping power: QFi k. The efficiency of the separation between different particle types increases with energy of the incident radiation (i.e., the amount of detected light)
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