29 June 2026 to 3 July 2026
Zürich
Europe/Zurich timezone

Development and First Results of a Cryogenic Heat Pump Demonstrator for High-Flow Radon Distillation in XLZD

29 Jun 2026, 18:21
1m
Zürich

Zürich

Speaker

Daniel Wenz

Description

One of the biggest challenges for XLZD will be the mitigation of ²²²Rn to a level ten times lower than the solar pp neutrino background. While cryogenic distillation has been proven to be a suitable tool to reduce the radon background in current-generation LXe TPCs, XLZD will require a purification flow approximately 200 times larger. This high flow necessitates the development of new technologies to provide the required cooling and heating power associated with the cryogenic distillation process.

In this poster, we present our first results from a small-scale cryogenic heat pump demonstrator, which serves as a proof of concept for such a technology. The demonstrator achieved cooling and heating powers of about 120 W each while consuming 386 W of electrical power. This is sufficient to operate a small distillation system with a purification mass flow of about 3.1 kg/h. The results of this demonstrator are put into perspective for the XLZD experiment using a simplified scaling model, showing that a radon distillation system with a total mass flow of 1600 kg/h and total required cooling and heating powers of about 60 kW each will be needed to achieve the ambitious goals of the experiment.

The project is financed through the ERC AdG "LowRad" project number 101055063.

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