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Borexino is an organic liquid scintillator underground detector for low energy solar neutrinos. The experiment has to satisfy extremely stringent low background requirements. The thin nylon spherical scintillator containment vessel has to meet cleanliness and low radioactivity levels second only, within the detector, to the scintillator itself. Overall, the background from the vessel in the fiducial volume of the detector must be kept at the level of one event per day or better. The requirements, design choices, results from laboratory tests, and fabrication techniques that have been adopted to meet this goal are presented. Details of the precautions taken during the installation of the vessels inside the Borexino detector are also discussed.
Borexino is a solar neutrino experiment designed to observe the 0.86 MeV Be-7 neutrinos emitted in the pp cycle of the sun. Neutrinos will be detected by their elastic scattering on electrons in 100 tons of liquid scintillator. The neutrino event rate in the scintillator is expected to be low (~0.35 events per day per ton), and the signals will be at energies below 1.5 MeV, where background from natural radioactivity is prominent. Scintillation light produced by the recoil electrons is observed by an array of 2240 photomultiplier tubes. Because of the intrinsic radioactive contaminants in these PMTs, the liquid scintillator is shielded from them by a thick barrier of buffer fluid. A spherical vessel made of thin nylon film contains the scintillator, separating it from the surrounding buffer. The buffer region itself is divided into two concentric shells by a second nylon vessel in order to prevent inward diffusion of radon atoms. The radioactive background requirements for Borexino are challenging to meet, especially for the scintillator and these nylon vessels. Besides meeting requirements for low radioactivity, the nylon vessels must also satisfy requirements for mechanical, optical, and chemical properties. The present paper describes the research and development, construction, and installation of the nylon vessels for the Borexino experiment.
The MAJORANA Collaboration is searching for the neutrinoless double-beta decay of the nucleus Ge-76. The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR is an array of germanium detectors deployed with the aim of implementing background reduction techniques suitable for a tonne scale Ge-76-based search (the LEGEND collaboration). In the DEMONSTRATOR, germanium detectors operate in an ultra-pure vacuum cryostat at 80 K. One special challenge of an ultra-pure environment is to develop reliable cables, connectors, and electronics that do not significantly contribute to the radioactive background of the experiment. This paper highlights the experimental requirements and how these requirements were met for the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR, including plans to upgrade the wiring for higher reliability in the summer of 2018. Also described are requirements for LEGEND R&D efforts underway to meet these additional requirements.
The MAJORANA Collaboration is constructing the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR, an ultra-low background, 40-kg modular HPGe detector array to search for neutrinoless double beta decay in 76Ge. In view of the next generation of tonne-scale Ge-based 0nbb-decay searches that will probe the neutrino mass scale in the inverted-hierarchy region, a major goal of the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR is to demonstrate a path forward to achieving a background rate at or below 1 count/tonne/year in the 4 keV region of interest around the Q-value at 2039 keV. The background rejection techniques to be applied to the data include cuts based on data reduction, pulse shape analysis, event coincidences, and time correlations. The Point Contact design of the DEMONSTRATOR 0s germanium detectors allows for significant reduction of gamma background.
CUORE is a tonne-scale cryogenic detector operating at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) that uses tellurium dioxide bolometers to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay of $^{130}$Te. CUORE is also suitable to search for low energy rare events such as solar axions or WIMP scattering, thanks to its ultra-low background and large target mass. However, to conduct such sensitive searches requires improving the energy threshold to 10 keV. In this paper, we describe the analysis techniques developed for the low energy analysis of CUORE-like detectors, using the data acquired from November 2013 to March 2015 by CUORE-0, a single-tower prototype designed to validate the assembly procedure and new cleaning techniques of CUORE. We explain the energy threshold optimization, continuous monitoring of the trigger efficiency, data and event selection, and energy calibration at low energies in detail. We also present the low energy background spectrum of CUORE-0 below 60keV. Finally, we report the sensitivity of CUORE to WIMP annual modulation using the CUORE-0 energy threshold and background, as well as an estimate of the uncertainty on the nuclear quenching factor from nuclear recoils in CUORE-0.
Borexino is a liquid scintillator detector located at the Laboratori Nazionale del Gran Sasso, Italy with the main goal to measure solar neutrinos. The experiment recently provided the first direct experimental evidence of CNO-cycle neutrinos in the Sun, rejecting the no-CNO signal hypothesis with a significance greater than 5$sigma$ at 99%C.L. The intrinsic $^{210}$Bi is an important background for this analysis due to its similar spectral shape to that of CNO neutrinos. $^{210}$Bi can be measured through its daughter $^{210}$Po which can be distinguished through an event-by-event basis via pulse shape discrimination. However, this required reducing the convective motions in the scintillator that brought additional $^{210}$Po from peripheral sources. This was made possible through the thermal insulation and stabilization campaign performed between 2015 and 2016. This article will explain the strategy and the different methods performed to extract the $^{210}$Bi upper limit in Phase-III (Jul 2016- Feb 2020) of the experiment through the analysis of $^{210}$Po in the cleanest region of the detector called the Low Polonium Field.