Conveners
Labs and Low Background: 1
- Richard Ford
Labs and Low Background: 2
- Richard Ford
Radon is an important background consideration for rare-event searches such as dark matter direct detection and neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments. Materials of construction for these experiments often require screening of ultra-low radon levels, sometimes as few as tens of atoms in equilibrium. Radon emanation is one of the most sensitive and robust ways of making these measurements....
Activation of germanium crystals due to cosmic rays becomes a serious hazard for experiments searching for rare events with germanium detectors.
Cosmic ray induced activation of the detector components and, even more importantly, of the germanium itself during production, transportation and storage at the Earth's surface, might result in the production of radioactive isotopes with long...
As a few ultra-low background rare decay experiments at the Yangyang underground laboratory in Korea are being prepared and under operation, a number of ultra-low radioactivity measurement detectors have been developed. For a screening of raw materials or detector components, an ICP-MS, an argon gas ionization counter, a ZnS counter, and a number of HPGe detectors are operating. A silicon PIN...
High-sensitivity, low-threshold material surface screening is necessary to meet the stringent radiopurity requirements for rare-event searches. The BetaCage is a proposed ultra-low-background time projection chamber (TPC) designed to screen alphas and low-energy betas emitted from material surfaces at trace levels, providing a transformative effect on isotopic assay efforts. I will describe...
DUNE, the DEEP Underground Neutrino Experiment, will be a groundbreaking experiment for long-baseline neutrino oscillation studies, and for neutrino astrophysics and nucleon decay searches. Planning of DUNE continues to proceed rapidly. The DUNE Far Detector will consist of four 10-kiloton fiducial volume modular liquid argon time-projection chambers (LArTPC) placed deep underground at the...
The former Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, has been transformed into a dedicated facility to pursue underground research in rare-process physics, as well as offering unique research opportunities in other disciplines. The Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) includes two main campuses at the 4850-foot level (4300 m.w.e.) – the Davis Campus and the Ross Campus – that host a...
Dark matter constitutes over 80% of the matter in the Universe, but its composition remains one of the most profound mysteries in modern science. The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search at SNOLAB will use germanium and silicon ultra-high-resolution detectors to search for small energy depositions from galactic dark matter particles with masses below 10× the mass of the proton. Decay of radon...
Experiments currently searching for dark matter and studying properties of neutrinos require very low levels of radioactive backgrounds both in their own construction materials and in the surrounding environment. These low background levels are required so that the current and next generation experiments can achieve the required sensitivities for their searches. This presentation will describe...
About 25 year ago LUNA (laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics) opened the era of underground nuclear astrophysics installing a home-made 50 kV ion accelerator under the Gran Sasso mountain. A second machine, with a terminal voltage of 400 kV, was then installed and it is still in operation. Most of the processes so far investigated were connected to the physics of solar neutrinos and...
The DarkSide-50 two-phase liquid argon (LAr) detector has been searching for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter for the past three years, and during the last two years has been successfully operating the detector with argon that was extracted from underground CO$_2$ wells in Cortez, Colorado in the US. This source of argon has been long shielded from cosmic rays entering...
In the VIP2 (VIolation of the Pauli Exlusion Principle) experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory (LNGS) we are searching for possible violations of standard quantum mechanics predictions. With high precision we investigate the Pauli Exclusion Principle and the collapse of the wave function (collapse models). We will present our experimental method of searching for possible small...
GINGER (Gyroscopes IN General Relativity) is a proposal aiming at measuring the Lense-Thirring effect with an experiment based on Earth. It is an array of ring lasers, which are the most sensitive inertial sensors to measure the rotation rate of the Earth. GINGERino is a ring laser prototype installed inside the underground laboratory of Gran Sasso, it is aiming at understand whether the...
DarkSide-20k is a proposed 20 tonne fiducial mass liquid argon TPC that will perform an instrumental background-free search for WIMP dark matter. The TPC will be outfitted with more than 125,000 silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) grouped into 5210 single-channel, $25\ {\rm cm}^2$ photosensors that are sensitive to single photoelectrons. We will present the performance of the photosensor and...
JUNO (Jiangmen Underground Neutrino observatory) will use 20 ktons high light yield, high transparency and low background Liquid Scintillator (LS). The purification of LS is very important work of JUNO construction. This talk introduced the status of the JUNO LS purification. The pilot plant of four purification systems (Al2O3 absorption, distillation, water extraction and steam stripping) was...
