Radiopurity of a kg-scale PbWO${}_4$ cryogenic detector produced from archaeological Pb for the RES-NOVA experiment

Abstract

RES-NOVA is a newly proposed experiment for the detection of neutrinos from astrophysical sources, mainly Supernovae, using an array of cryogenic detectors made of PbWO${}_4$ crystals produced from archaeological Pb. This unconventional material, characterized by intrinsic high radiopurity, enables to achieve low-background levels in the region of interest for the neutrino detection via Coherent Elastic neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CE$\nu$NS). This signal lies at the detector energy threshold, O(1 keV), and it is expected to be hidden by naturally occurring radioactive contaminants of the crystal absorber. Here, we present the results of a radiopurity assay on a 0.84 kg PbWO${}_4$ crystal produced from archaeological Pb operated as a cryogenic detector. The crystal internal radioactive contaminations are: ${}^{232}$Th $<$40 $\mu$Bq/kg, ${}^{238}$U $<$30 $\mu$Bq/kg, ${}^{226}$Ra 1.3 mBq/kg and ${}^{210}$Pb 22.5 mBq/kg. We present also a background projection for the final experiment and possible mitigation strategies for further background suppression. The achieved results demonstrate the feasibility of realizing this new class of detectors.

New analysis with high statistic

References in corpus (7)

• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• Observation of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering
• SNEWS 2.0: A Next-Generation SuperNova Early Warning System for Multi-messenger Astronomy
• The CUORE cryostat: an infrastructure for rare event searches at millikelvin temperatures
• Enriched TeO${}_2$ bolometers with active particle discrimination: towards the CUPID experiment
• RES-NOVA sensitivity to core-collapse and failed core-collapse supernova neutrinos
• Development of cryogenic calorimeters to measure the spectral shape of In-115 beta decay

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Array of Cryogenic Calorimeters to Evaluate the Spectral Shape of forbidden $\beta$-decays: the ACCESS project
• A new dark matter direct search based on archaeological Pb
• A rapid low-background assay of ${}^{210}$Pb in archaeological lead
• Oscillation-Independent Probes of Neutrino Non-Standard Interactions from Supernovae
• High-Dimensional Bayesian Likelihood Normalisation for CRESST's Background Model
• Online triggers for supernova and pre-supernova neutrino detection with cryogenic detectors