Conveners
WG3: Noble Element Detectors
- Elena Gramellini (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
- Scott Hertel (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
- Chris Stanford (Fermilab)
WG3: Noble Element Detectors
- Elena Gramellini (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
- Scott Hertel (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
- Chris Stanford (Fermilab)
WG3: Noble Element Detectors
- Elena Gramellini (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
- Scott Hertel (Member@umass.edu)
- Scott Hertel (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
- Chris Stanford (Fermilab)
WG3: Noble Element Detectors
- Elena Gramellini (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
- Scott Hertel (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
- Chris Stanford (Fermilab)
WG3: Noble Element Detectors
- Chris Stanford (Fermilab)
- Scott Hertel (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
- Elena Gramellini (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
WG3: Noble Element Detectors
- Chris Stanford (Fermilab)
- Elena Gramellini (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
- Scott Hertel (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
The scintillation, ionization, and electroluminescence properties of liquid argon are substantially modified by the addition of small quantities of xenon in a way that benefits many experiments. The resulting target medium retains the low cost and light nuclear mass of argon needed for large neutrino CENS and dark matter experiments. Maintaining a stable mixture suitable for particle...
Xenon and argon are widely used target media for low cross-section experiments including neutrino physics and dark matter searches. Xenon-doping of dual phase argon time projection chambers (TPCs) at the O(1%) level may enable these technologies to reach unprecedented sensitivity limits. However, the large temperature discrepancy between the argon and xenon boiling points can produce...
If neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) is not observed in the upcoming generation of ton-scale detectors, future detectors at the kiloton-scale may be required to probe the majority of the remaining parameter space for the decay. Gas or liquid phase xenon time projection chambers (TPCs) provide a possible path to reaching $0\nu\beta\beta$ half-life sensitivities as long as...
The purely electron antineutrino source and high flux makes nuclear power reactors an
attractive place to set up a detector for reactor monitoring and searches for neutrino inter-
actions. One such interaction is Coherent Elastic Neutrino Nucleus Scattering (CEνNS),
which is one of the lowest energy processes predicted by the standard model, and has drawn
experimental interest in recent...
A vast body of astrophysical and cosmological observations point at the existence of Dark Matter (DM). A well motivated DM candidate is a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP, a thermal relic of the Big Bang, which has sub-electroweak-scale self-annihilation cross section and mass up the TeV/c$^2$-range. The motion of galactic halo WIMPs relative to a detector on Earth could result in...
(on behalf of DUNE PhotonDetector Consortium)
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is currently investigating a new prototype design for its second Far Detector module. The new concept proposes a Vertical Drift (VD) LArTPC, with a cathode at mid-height in the detector and anodes made of printed circuit boards (PCB), located at the top and bottom of the detector volume. The photon...
The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment recently announced its first, world-leading exclusion limits in the search for WIMP dark matter, with spin-independent and spin-dependent results. These results are supported by high-statistic, high-quality calibrations. For electron recoils, tritiated methane is used to produce beta decays up to 18.6 keV, Rn-220 for energies out to 100+ keV, and Kr83m and...
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment is a direct detection dark matter experiment that uses a dual-phase time-projection chamber (TPC) containing 7 tonnes of active xenon with a 5.6 tonne fiducial volume. In LZ, precision nuclear recoil (NR) calibrations are critical to understanding the signal response of dark matter interactions with the liquid xenon inside the detector. Monoenergetic 2.45 MeV...
Liquid argon (LAr) is widely used as a detector medium to image particle interactions from the keV to GeV scale in searches for rare processes and measurements of neutrino interactions. Furthermore, a vibrant R&D community is active in developing scalable LAr detectors with lower thresholds and fine granularity. One such effort, LArCADe, intends to explore the feasibility of charge...
We have a history of dark matter searches with noble liquids dual-phase detectors with an increasing track of observed condensed matter effects and contradictions that are yet unresolved. By attempting to establish correspondence with results and trends observed in low-temperature helium physics, we come up with a hypothesizes that the accumulation of unextracted electrons on the liquid-gas...
The Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) is one of the main neutrino detection techniques. It enables highly detailed reconstruction of neutrino events with high spatial precision and low energy threshold. The field response, which describes the induced current on the anode-plane readout for the drifting ionization electrons, is a crucial input to the overall LArTPC event processing...
We propose the crystalline xenon time projection chamber(TPC) as a promising novel technology for next-generation dark matter search. We expect it to exclude and tag radon-chain backgrounds while maintaining the instrumental benefits of liquid xenon TPC. We have built and successfully operated a crystalline/vapor dual-phase xenon TPC in Berkeley Lab. This talk will discuss its instrumental...
The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration will combine the well-established liquid argon and bubble chamber technologies to search for GeV-scale dark matter and the coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering from MeV reactor neutrinos. SBC detectors benefit from the excellent electron-recoil insensitivity inherent in bubble chambers with the addition of energy reconstruction...
Bubble chambers using liquid xenon (and liquid argon) have been operated (resp. planned) by the Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration to search for GeV-scale dark matter and CEvNS from nuclear reactors. This requires a robust calibration program of the nucleation efficiency of low-energy nuclear recoils in these target media. Such experiments were performed with a liquid xenon test...
The snowball chamber is analogous to the bubble and cloud chambers in that it relies on a phase transition, but it is new to high-energy particle physics. The concept of the snowball chamber relies on supercooled water (or a noble element, for scintillation for energy reconstruction), which can remain metastable for long time periods in a sufficiently clean and smooth container (on the level...
nEXO is a next-generation neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment that is searching for this decay in 5-tonnes of liquid xenon (LXe) enriched in the isotope 136Xe. Silicon-photomultipliers have been selected to measure the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) scintillation light from interactions within the LXe. Although candidate SiPMs from Hamamatsu (HPK) and FBK have been characterised within the...
Liquid xenon-based direct detection dark matter experiments have recently expanded their searches to include high-energy nuclear recoil events as motivated by effective field theory dark matter and inelastic dark matter interaction models, but few xenon recoil calibrations above 100 keV are currently available. In this presentation, we will describe the experimental setup and results from our...
As a leading detector technology at the intensity frontier, liquid noble element detectors simultaneously measure the emission of ionization charge (electrons) and prompt scintillation light produced by ionizing particles passing through the noble element. Since the signals are relatively small, lots of efforts are being made to amplify the charge signals by electronic amplifiers after the...
Dual-phase noble gas Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) suffer from spurious electron background events in the lowest detectable energy region. This background has also been reported in liquid xenon TPCs, and some of the causes are discussed in the literature. Understanding its origin is of paramount importance, as this background sets the analysis threshold and affects the most sensitive part of...
Modern particle detectors based on liquid and gaseous argon are designed to detect scintillation light in vacuum-ultraviolet (VUV) regime. It is known however, that luminescence at longer wavelengths takes place, in visible part of the spectrum and up to the near-infrared (NIR).
Studies of argon scintillation in various spectral ranges are being performed at Fermilab, specifically focused...
To maximise the physics reach of time projection chambers, it is vital that we have accurate knowledge of the transport properties of the ionisation electrons that drift through such detectors. One such property, ionisation electron diffusion, has typically been considered during detector design, with little attention given to its effects on high-level physics. This talk will provide a brief...
The low energy program of next generation LArTPCs is currently expected to span a range of energies as low as 10s of MeV. LArTPC capabilities below 10 MeV could enable DUNE sensitivity to solar neutrinos and neutrino-less double-beta decay in addition to enhanced sensitivity to the supernova neutrino signals. We summarize the challenges of enhancing LArTPC sensitivities near 1 MeV and propose...
The Short Baseline Neutrino program in Fermilab's Booster Neutrino Beam will search for eV-scale sterile neutrinos with multiple detectors at different baselines locations. Located 110 meters downstream from the neutrino target, the Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND) will have an unprecedented rate of ~5000 neutrino interactions per day enabling a broad physics program that includes detailed...
The experimental effort to detect neutrinoless double beta decay has shown numerous R&D advancements in the past several years. One of the R&D lines being explored in high pressure gas xenon detectors, such as those used by the NEXT experiment, is the utilization of a fast optical camera in order to digitize the tracking information. Another R&D line is tagging of the daughter Barium ion, from...
Demonstration of a highly efficient single ion barium tagging sensor could reduce backgrounds in searches for neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu \beta \beta$) to negligible levels in ton to multi-ton scale experiments. The NEXT collaboration is pursuing a phased program to search for $0\nu \beta \beta$ using high pressure xenon gas time projection chambers. The implementation of single ion...
The Q-Pix concept (arXiv: 1809.10213) is a continuously integrating low-power charge-sensitive amplifier (CSA) viewed by a Schmitt trigger. When the trigger threshold is met, the comparator initiates a ‘reset’ transition and returns the CSA circuitry to a stable baseline. This is the elementary Charge-Integrate / Reset (CIR) circuit. The instance of reset time is captured in a 32-bit clock...
3D ionization information facilitates unambiguous mm-scale fine-tracking in high occupancy liquid argon time-projection chamber (LArTPC) environments. LArPix-v2 incorporates low-power 64-channel custom ASICs with a mixed-signal large-format printed circuit board for an unambiguous 3D charge-readout anode. With robust I/O and control architecture, a 10-by-10 array of ASICs instrument a...
The Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) will be one of three Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) neutrino detectors positioned along the axis of the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab, as part of the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program. The detector has been recently is completed and is anticipated to begin operation in 2023. SBND will record over a million neutrino...
