Scintillation response of liquid xenon to low energy nuclear recoils

Liquid Xenon (LXe) is expected to be an excellent target and detection medium to search for dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). We have measured the scintillation efficiency of nuclear recoils with kinetic energy between 10.4 and 56.5 keV relative to that of 122 keV gamma rays from ⁵⁷Co. The scintillation yield of 56.5 keV recoils was also measured as a function of applied electric field, and compared to that of gamma rays and alpha particles. The Xe recoils were produced by elastic scattering of 2.4 MeV neutrons in liquid xenon at a variety of scattering angles. The relative scintillation efficiency is 0.130±0.024 and 0.227±0.016 for the lowest and highest energy recoils, respectively. This is about 15% less than the value predicted by Lindhard, based on nuclear quenching. Our results are in good agreement with more recent theoretical predictions that consider the additional reduction of scintillation yield due to biexcitonic collisions in LXe.