Interpretation of Light-Quenching Factor Measurements

We observe that the pattern of the quenching factors for scintillation light from various ions, recently studied in $CaW{O}_4$ in connection with dark matter detectors, can be understood as a saturation phenomenon in which the light output is simply proportional to track length, independent of the ion and its energy. This observation is in accord with the high dE/dx limit of Birks’ law. It suggests a simple model for the intrinsic resolution of light detectors for low energy ions, which we briefly discuss.