Radon depletion in xenon boil-off gas

Abstract

An important background in detectors using liquid xenon for rare event searches arises from the decays of radon and its daughters. We report for the first time a reduction of ${}^{222}$Rn in the gas phase above a liquid xenon reservoir. We show a reduction factor of $\gtrsim 4$ for the ${}^{222}$Rn concentration in boil-off xenon gas compared to the radon enriched liquid phase. A semiconductor-based $\alpha$-detector and miniaturized proportional counters are used to detect the radon. As the radon depletion in the boil-off gas is understood as a single-stage distillation process, this result establishes the suitability of cryogenic distillation to separate radon from xenon down to the $10^{-15}$mol/mol level.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Radiogenic and Muon-Induced Backgrounds in the LUX Dark Matter Detector

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Dark matter direct-detection experiments
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• The XENONnT Dark Matter Experiment
• Online ${}^{222}$Rn removal by cryogenic distillation in the XENON100 experiment
• Direct Detection of Dark Matter -- APPEC Committee Report
• ${}^{222}$Rn emanation measurements for the XENON1T experiment
• Design, construction and commissioning of a high-flow radon removal system for XENONnT
• Characterization of alpha and beta interactions in liquid xenon
• Evaluation of radon adsorption efficiency values in xenon with activated carbon fibers
• Inelastic dark matter nucleus scattering
• Radon background in liquid xenon detectors
• Scintillation decay-time constants for alpha particles and electrons in liquid xenon
• Material radiopurity control in the XENONnT experiment