https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-024-05195-y
Regular Article
A novel nuclear recoil calibration for liquid helium detectors
1
Division of Nuclear Physics, China Institute of Atomic Energy, Sanqiang Rd. 1, Fangshan District, 102413, Beijing, China
2
Department of Physics, Brown University, Hope St. 182, 02912, Providence, RI, USA
3
School of Physics, Peking University, ChengFu Rd. 209, Haidian District, 100084, Beijing, China
4
Division of Nuclear Synthesis Technology, China Institute of Atomic Energy, Sanqiang Rd. 1, Fangshan District, 102413, Beijing, China
a
FengboGu@outlook.com
c
junhui_liao@brown.edu
Received:
25
September
2023
Accepted:
18
April
2024
Published online:
23
May
2024
According to many dark matter models, a potential signal registered in a detector would feature a single-scattering nuclear recoil (NR). So, it is crucial to calibrate the detector’s response to NR events. The conventional calibrations implement 
keV to MeV neutrons, which can be produced by an accelerator, a neutron generator, or a radioactive source. Although the calibrating methods have been widely employed, they could be improved in several ways: (a) the incident neutron energy should be more monoenergetic, (b) the calibrating NR energy should line up with the region of interest (ROI) of the experiment, and (c) the intensity of the beam should be appropriate. In the paper, we introduce a novel NR calibration method for liquid helium detectors, in which a helium beam (
particles) will be implemented to calibrate the detectors. The helium beam can (i) be tuned precisely to have a jitter of 
4% (the beam’s kinetic energy is equivalent to the recoil energy in the conventional calibrations with fast neutrons); (ii) have an energy between 100 eV and tens of keV; and (iii) provide a tunable flux from nA to 100 
A, which presents convenience in beam pipe configuration to obtain a 100 Hz events rate so that the events pileup would be ignorable.
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