Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics

First Advisor

Moore, David

Abstract

Liquid Xenon detectors operated as time projection chambers have emerged as a key technology over the past decades in the search for extremely rare events, such as the interaction of dark matter or neutrinoless double beta decay Xe-136. These experiments need to operate in an ultra-low background regime. The remaining backgrounds need not only to be reliably and accurately modeled but also rejected using sophisticated reconstruction techniques that distinguish signal from background. In this work, three generations of liquid xenon experiments are examined. Data from the decommissioned ~200 kg EXO-200 experiment was analyzed for a recently-proposed interaction mechanism of fermionic dark matter with ordinary matter via charged-current absorption. A detailed understanding of the light and charge transport in liquid xenon for the upcoming tonne-scale nEXO experiment is described, including a robust estimate of the discovery and exclusion sensitivity for the neutrino less double beta decay of Xe-136. Lastly, a conceptual design for a possible kilotonne-scale liquid xenon detector is presented, which includes requirements on the photon detection system to enable novel Cherenkov and scintillation light separation for improved discrimination between beta-like background and double-beta-like signal events.

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