Abstract
The influence of air contamination on the VUV scintillation yield in gaseous argon at atmospheric pressure is investigated. We determine with a radioactive α-source the photon yield for various partial air pressures and different reflectors and wavelength shifters. We find that the time constant of the slow scintillation component depends on gas purity and is a good indicator for the total VUV light yield, while the fast component is not affected. This dependence is attributed to impurities destroying the long-lived triplet argon excimer state. The population ratio between the slow and the fast decaying excimer states is determined for α-particles to be 5.5 ± 0.6 in argon gas at 1100 mbar and room temperature. The measured decay time constant of the slow component is 3.140 ± 0.067 μs at a partial air pressure of 2 × 10−6 mbar.