Low energy alphas in the drift detector

The Directional Recoil Identification From Tracks project is a US-UK endeavor to build and operate a low pressure negative ion TPC (NITPC) to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) thought to make up the dark matter in our Galaxy. Low energy (similar to 10 keV) alpha events from U and Th decays within the walls and wires of the detector can enter the active volume of the detector and be confused for WIMP interactions. This paper presents data on and a model of low energy alphas in a NITPC operated at 40 Torr CS2 with the aim of understanding and removing this potentially serious background. A comparison of the data to this model reveals good agreement with range predictions of SRIM2000 and allows us to calculate the energy dissipation per ion pair, W = 19.0 +/- 0.5 eV for low energy alphas in CS2. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.