{
  "id": "1906.04712",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2019-06-11T17:28:17.000Z",
  "updated": "2019-06-11T17:28:17.000Z",
  "title": "Modeling emission of acoustic energy during bubble expansion in PICO bubble chambers",
  "authors": [
    "Tetiana Kozynets",
    "Scott Fallows",
    "Carsten B. Krauss"
  ],
  "comment": "15 pages, 17 figures",
  "categories": [
    "physics.ins-det",
    "physics.comp-ph"
  ],
  "abstract": "The PICO experiment uses bubble chambers filled with superheated C$_3$F$_8$ for spin-dependent WIMP dark matter searches. One of the main sources of background in these detectors is alpha particles from decays of environmental $^{222}\\mathrm{Rn}$, which nucleate bubbles that are visually indistinguishable from WIMP candidate events. Alpha-induced bubbles can be discriminated acoustically, because the signal from alpha events is consistently larger in magnitude than that from nuclear recoil/WIMP-like events. By studying the dynamics of bubbles nucleated by these two types of ionizing radiation from the first stages of their growth, we present a physical model for the acoustic discrimination for the first time. The distribution of acoustic energies that we generate for a simulated sample of bubble nucleations by alpha particles and nuclear recoils is compared directly to the experimental data.",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2019-06-11T17:28:17.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "keywords": [
      "pico bubble chambers",
      "acoustic energy",
      "modeling emission",
      "bubble expansion",
      "spin-dependent wimp dark matter searches"
    ],
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 15,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable"
    }
  }
}