Mitigation of backgrounds from cosmogenic 137 Xe in xenon gas experiments using 3 He neutron capture

Autor: A. Usón, Víctor H. Alvarez, L. Labarga, J. Torrent, Sandra K. Johnston, K. Bailey, J. Haefner, M. Sorel, R.D.P. Mano, P. Lebrun, T. Contreras, C.A.O. Henriques, P. Herrero, Y. Ifergan, J. Generowicz, A.L. Ferreira, Javier Rodríguez, G. Díaz, J.F.C.A. Veloso, E.D.C. Freitas, B. Palmeiro, M. Diesburg, M. Querol, Jose Repond, J. Escada, F.J. Mora, J. M. Benlloch-Rodríguez, J.V. Carrión, L. Rogers, F. Monrabal, Lior Arazi, Javier Pérez, C.M.B. Monteiro, C. Adams, T.M. Stiegler, Diego González-Díaz, G. Martínez-Lema, Y. Rodriguez Garcia, J. A. Hernando Morata, R. Felkai, L.M.P. Fernandes, A.F.M. Fernandes, A. Goldschmidt, C. Sofka, Sudip Ghosh, S. Cebrián, B. Romeo, M. Kekic, C.D.R. Azevedo, E. Church, C.A.N. Conde, P. Novella, A.B. Redwine, F.I.G.M. Borges, R. M. Gutiérrez, J. Martín-Albo, N. Lopez-March, R. C. Webb, J.J. Gómez-Cadenas, N. Byrnes, F.P. Santos, A.D. McDonald, J. Muñoz Vidal, K. Woodruff, D. R. Nygren, R. Weiss-Babai, J. T. White, J. Renner, J. M. Hauptman, A. Laing, N. Yahlali, Romain Esteve, M. Losada, R. Dingler, V. Herrero, F. Ballester, Paola Ferrario, I. J. Arnquist, R. Guenette, B. Smithers, J.F. Toledo, S. Cárcel, S. Riordan, A. Martínez, L. Ripoll, B. J. P. Jones, S. Pingulkar, J.M.F. dos Santos, J. Díaz, A. Para, K. Hafidi, A. Simón, C. Romo-Luque
Přispěvatelé: UAM. Departamento de Física Teórica
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
instname
Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
ISSN: 1361-6471
0954-3899
DOI: 10.1088/1361-6471/ab8915
Popis: [EN] Xe-136 is used as the target medium for many experiments searching for 0 nu beta beta. Despite underground operation, cosmic muons that reach the laboratory can produce spallation neutrons causing activation of detector materials. A potential background that is difficult to veto using muon tagging comes in the form of Xe-137 created by the capture of neutrons on Xe-136. This isotope decays via beta decay with a half-life of 3.8 min and a Q(beta) of similar to 4.16 MeV. This work proposes and explores the concept of adding a small percentage of He-3 to xenon as a means to capture thermal neutrons and reduce the number of activations in the detector volume. When using this technique we find the contamination from Xe-137 activation can be reduced to negligible levels in tonne and multi-tonne scale high pressure gas xenon neutrinoless double beta decay experiments running at any depth in an underground laboratory.
The work described was supported by the Department of Energy under Award numbers DE-SC0019054 and DE-SC0019223. The NEXT Collaboration acknowledges support from the following agencies and institutions: the European Research Council (ERC) under the Advanced Grant 339787-NEXT; the European Union's Framework Program for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) under the Marie Skodowska-Curie Grant Agreements No. 674896, 690575 and 740055; the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of Spain under grants FIS2014-53371-C04, the Severo Ochoa Program SEV-2014-0398 and the Maria de Maetzu Program MDM-2016-0692; the GVA of Spain under grants PROMETEO/2016/120 and SEJI/2017/011; the Portuguese FCT under project PTDC/FIS-NUC/2525/2014, under project UID/FIS/04559/2013 to fund the activities of LIBPhys, and under grants PD/BD/105921/2014, SFRH/BPD/109180/2015 and SFRH/BPD/76842/2011. Finally, we are grateful to the Laboratorio Subterraneo de Canfranc for hosting and supporting the NEXT experiment.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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