Radiopurity assessment of the tracking readout for the NEXT double beta decay experiment

Abstract

The Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon Time-Projection Chamber (NEXT) is intended to investigate the neutrinoless double beta decay of 136Xe, which requires a severe suppression of potential backgrounds; therefore, an extensive screening and selection process is underway to control the radiopurity levels of the materials to be used in the experimental set-up of NEXT. The detector design combines the measurement of the topological signature of the event for background discrimination with the energy resolution optimization. Separate energy and tracking readout planes are based on different sensors: photomultiplier tubes for calorimetry and silicon multi-pixel photon counters for tracking. The design of a radiopure tracking plane, in direct contact with the gas detector medium, was specially challenging since the needed components like printed circuit boards, connectors, sensors or capacitors have typically, according to available information in databases and in the literature, activities too large for experiments requiring ultra-low background conditions. Here, the radiopurity assessment of tracking readout components based on gamma-ray spectroscopy using ultra-low background germanium detectors at the Laboratorio Subterraneo de Canfranc (Spain) is described. According to the obtained results, radiopure enough printed circuit boards made of kapton and copper, silicon photomultipliers and other required components, fulfilling the requirement of an overall background level in the region of interest of at most 8 10-4 counts keV-1 kg-1 y-1, have been identified.

References in corpus (9)

• Double Beta Decay, Majorana Neutrinos, and Neutrino Mass
• Systematic study of trace radioactive impurities in candidate construction materials for EXO-200
• Recent Progress in Double Beta Decay
• Radiopurity of Micromegas readout planes
• Background rejection in NEXT using deep neural networks
• Initial results of NEXT-DEMO, a large-scale prototype of the NEXT-100 experiment
• Sense and sensitivity of double beta decay experiments
• Characterisation of NEXT-DEMO using xenon K${}_{\alpha }$ X-rays
• Material Screening with HPGe Counting Station for PandaX Experiment

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The ArDM Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory: a ton-scale detector for Dark Matter Searches
• Radiopurity assessment of the energy readout for the NEXT double beta decay experiment
• Ultra-low radioactivity Kapton and copper-Kapton laminates
• Enhanced low-energy supernova burst detection in large liquid argon time projection chambers enabled by Q-Pix
• Status and prospects of the NEXT experiment for neutrinoless double beta decay searches
• Status of ArDM-1t: First observations from operation with a full ton-scale liquid argon target
• Double Beta Decay Experiments at Canfranc Underground Laboratory
• Mass spectrometric analyses of high performance polymers to assess radiopurity as ultra low background materials for rare event physics detectors
• AlphaCAMM, a Micromegas-based camera for high-sensitivity screening of alpha surface contamination
• High Pressure Gas Xenon TPCs for Double Beta Decay Searches