A simple high-sensitivity technique for purity analysis of xenon gas

Abstract

We report on the development and performance of a high-sensitivity purity-analysis technique for gaseous xenon. The gas is sampled at macroscopic pressure from the system of interest using a UHV leak valve. The xenon present in the sample is removed with a liquid-nitrogen cold trap, and the remaining impurities are observed with a standard vacuum mass-spectroscopy device. Using calibrated samples of xenon gas spiked with known levels of impurities, we find that the minimum detectable levels of N2, O2, and methane are 1 ppb, 160 ppt, and 60 ppt respectively. This represents an improvement of about a factor of 10,000 compared to measurements performed without a coldtrap.

20 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Liquid Xenon Detectors for Particle Physics and Astrophysics
• Absorption of Scintillation Light in a 100 $\ell$ Liquid Xenon$\gamma$ Ray Detector and Expected Detector Performance

Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Experiment
• The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment
• Removing krypton from xenon by cryogenic distillation to the ppq level
• Technical Results from the Surface Run of the LUX Dark Matter Experiment
• Chromatographic separation of radioactive noble gases from xenon
• Detection of krypton in xenon for dark matter applications
• Xenon purity analysis for EXO-200 via mass spectrometry
• The LUX Prototype Detector: Heat Exchanger Development
• A xenon gas purity monitor for EXO
• The LUX Dark Matter Search -- Status Update
• In situ measurements of Krypton in Xenon gas with a quadrupole mass spectrometer following a cold-trap at a temporarily reduced pumping speed
• Study of dielectric breakdown in liquid xenon with the XeBrA experiment