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Scintillation Efficiency for Low-Energy Nuclear Recoils in Liquid-Xenon Dark Matter Detectors

We perform a theoretical study of the scintillation efficiency in the low-energy region crucial for liquid-xenon dark-matter detectors. We develop a computer program to simulate the cascading process of the recoiling xenon nucleus in liquid xenon and calculate the nuclear quenching effect due to atomic collisions. We use the electronic stopping power extrapolated from the experimental data to the low-energy region, and take into account the effects of electrons escaping from the electron-ion pair recombination using the generalized Thomas-Imel model fitted to scintillation data. Our result agrees well with the experiments from neutron scattering and vanishes rapidly as the recoiling energy drops below 3 keV.