A theoretical simulation of a superfluid 3He-B nuclear recoil detector

It has recently been shown that superfluid 3He-B constitutes a practical nuclear recoil detector, with a crude pilot study measuring neutron and gamma events down to approx. 1 keV. The authors emphasized the preliminary nature of their experiment and went on to suggest that the ultimate sensitivity of the technique could be improved by several orders of magnitude with some simple modifications. In this paper we discuss the results of a computer simulation of the proposed experimental arrangement, which suggests that ≅ eV resolutions may indeed prove feasible. (author)