Abstract
Dark matter candidates such as the weakly interacting massive particles can be detected through elastic scatterings with a nucleus. The scintillation efficiency of carbon and hydrogen nuclear recoils in an organic liquid scintillator was measured for such a possible dark matter detector. The recoil energies from 50 keV to ∼1 MeV were explored for both nuclei. The carbon recoil efficiency, of particular interest for a dark matter detector, was observed to increase from 0.8 +0.09 −0.11% of the electron recoil efficiency at 500 keV to 4.8 +0.85 −2.99% at 46 keV. Such an enhancement is very encouraging for the purpose of dark matter searches as well as other similar low-energy experiments, and the results are well described by a modified Birks' light yield formula.
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