Noble gas permeabilities and diffusivities of Kapton, butyl, nylon, and Silver Shield are measured at temperatures between 22C and 115C. The breakthrough times and solubilities at 22C are also determined. The relationship of the room temperature permeabilities to the noble gas atomic radii is used to estimate radon permeability for each material studied. For the noble gases tested, Kapton and Silver Shield have the lowest permeabilities and diffusivities, followed by nylon and butyl, respectively.
The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment operates at the Sanford Underground Research Facility to detect nuclear recoils from the hypothetical Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) on a liquid xenon target. Liquid xenon typically contains trace amounts of the noble radioactive isotopes $^{85}$Kr and $^{39}$Ar that are not removed by the in situ gas purification system. The decays of these isotopes at concentrations typical of research-grade xenon would be a dominant background for a WIMP search exmperiment. To remove these impurities from the liquid xenon, a chromatographic separation system based on adsorption on activated charcoal was built. 400 kg of xenon was processed, reducing the average concentration of krypton from 130 ppb to 3.5 ppt as measured by a cold-trap assisted mass spectroscopy system. A 50 kg batch spiked to 0.001 g/g of krypton was processed twice and reduced to an upper limit of 0.2 ppt.
Polyimide-based materials, like Kapton, are widely used in flexible cables and circuitry due to their unique electrical and mechanical characteristics. This study is aimed at investigating the radiopurity of Kapton for use in ultralow background, rare-event physics applications by measuring the $^{238}$U, $^{232}$Th, and $^{nat}$K levels using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Commercial-off-the-shelf Kapton varieties, measured at approximately 950 and 120 pg/g $^{238}$U and $^{232}$Th (1.2$times$10$^4$ and 490 $mu$Bq/kg), respectively, can be a significant background source for many current and next-generation ultralow background detectors. This study has found that the dominant contamination is due to the use of dicalcium phosphate (DCP), a nonessential slip additive added during manufacturing. Alternative Kapton materials were obtained that did not contain DCP and were determined to be significantly more radiopure than the commercially-available options with 12 and 19 pg/g $^{238}$U and $^{232}$Th (150 and 77 $mu$Bq/kg), respectively. The lowest radioactivity version produced (Kapton ELJ, which contains an adhesive) was found to contain single digit pg/g levels of $^{238}$U and $^{232}$Th, two-to-three orders of magnitude cleaner than commercial-off-the-shelf options. Moreover, copper-clad polyimide laminates employing Kapton ELJ as the insulator were obtained and shown to be very radiopure at 8.6 and 22 pg/g $^{238}$U and $^{232}$Th (110 and 89 $mu$Bq/kg), respectively.
Dielectric breakdown strength is one of the critical performance metrics for gases and mixtures used in large, high pressure gas time projection chambers. In this paper we experimentally study dielectric breakdown strengths of several important time projection chamber working gases and gas-phase insulators over the pressure range 100 mbar to 10 bar, and gap sizes ranging from 0.1to 10 mm. Gases characterized include argon, xenon, CO2, CF4, and mixtures 90-10 argon-CH4,90-10 argon-CO2and 99-1 argon-CF4. We develop a theoretical model for high voltage breakdown based on microphysical simulations that use PyBoltz electron swarm Monte Carlo results as input to Townsend- and Meek-like discharge criteria. This model is shown to be highly predictive at high pressure, out-performing traditional Paschen-Townsend and Meek-Raether models significantly. At lower pressure-times-distance, the Townsend-like model is an excellent description for noble gases whereas the Meek-like model provides a highly accurate prediction for insulating gases.
A study of the gas pressure effect in the position resolution of an interacting X- or gamma-ray photon in a gas medium is performed. The intrinsic position resolution for pure noble gases (Argon and Xenon) and their mixtures with CO2 and CH4 were calculated for several gas pressures (1-10bar) and for photon energies between 5.4 and 60.0 keV, being possible to establish a linear match between the intrinsic position resolution and the inverse of the gas pressure in that energy range. In order to evaluate the quality of the method here described, a comparison between the available experimental data and the calculated one in this work, is done and discussed. In the majority of the cases, a strong agreement is observed.
Proportional electroluminescence (EL) is the physical effect used in two-phase detectors for dark matter searches, to optically record (in the gas phase) the ionization signal produced by particle scattering in the liquid phase. In our previous work the presence of a new EL mechanism, namely that of neutral bremsstrahlung (NBrS), was demonstrated in two-phase argon detectors both theoretically and experimentally, in addition to the ordinary EL mechanism due to excimer emission. In this work the similar theoretical approach is applied to all noble gases, i.e. overall to helium, neon, argon, krypton and xenon, to calculate the EL yields and spectra both for NBrS and excimer EL. The relevance of the results obtained to the development of two-phase dark matter detectors is discussed.
Steven J. Schowalter
,Colin B. Connolly
,John M. Doyle
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(2009)
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"Permeability of Noble Gases through Kapton, Butyl, Nylon, and Silver Shield"
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Colin Connolly
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