A liquid-phase loop-mode argon purification system

Abstract

Noble gas and liquid detectors rely on high chemical purity for successful operation. While gaseous purification has emerged as a reliable method of producing high-purity noble fluids, the requirement for large mass flows drives the development of liquid-phase purification. We constructed a medium-scale liquid argon (LAr) purification system based on a copper catalyst and 4 A molecular sieve capable of purifying 1 t of commercial LAr 5.0 to a long effective triplet lifetime of ${\tau }_3\sim 1.3\mu$s. We further demonstrate that a quenched effective triplet lifetime of ${\tau }_3\sim 1\mu$s, due to contamination by air, can be recovered in loop-mode purification to ${\tau }_3\sim 1.3\mu$s after > 20 volume exchanges.

8 pages, 2 figures, contribution to LIDINE2023 v2: Added discussion of N2-trapping capability of purifier. Fixed typos, improved text/figure style, and added a reference

References in corpus (2)

• Experimental observation of an extremely high electron lifetime with the ICARUS-T600 LAr-TPC
• A Regenerable Filter for Liquid Argon Purification

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Flow and thermal modelling of the argon volume in the DarkSide-20k TPC