Speaker
Description
The Boulby Underground Laboratory provides a world class material screening suite for the radioassay of materials for rare-event particle research. This poster will present the Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer which is one of four instruments used at Boulby for the quantification of long-lived naturally occurring radionuclides Uranium-238 and Thorium-232 to high sensitivities. Using ion counting, the concentration of U-238 and Th-232 can be measured to provide a snapshot of a materials radio-purity. This is critical for next-generation rare-event experiments in dark matter and neutrinoless double-beta decay, helping to ensure that their background goals can be met.
In our purpose built ISO-6 cleanroom, we assay materials for collaborations such as XLZD and LEGEND, varying materials from metals to polymers which all require different digestion processes and careful ultra-clean preparation.
At Boulby Underground Laboratory, we aim to push our standard detection limits towards a radiopurity of 0.01 ppt (100ppq), and to be able to measure ultra-trace sensitivities of 10 parts-per-quadrillion (ppq).