Abstract: The development of BiPo detectors is dedicated to the measurement of extremely high radiopurity in (TI)-T-208 and Bi-214 for the SuperNEMO double beta decay source foils. A modular prototype, called BiPo-1, with 0.8 m(2) of sensitive surface area, has been running in the Modane Underground Laboratory since February, 2008. The goal of BiPo-1 is to measure the different components of the background and in particular the surface radiopurity of the plastic scintillators that make up the detector. The first phase of data collection has been dedicated to the measurement of the radiopurity in (TI)-T-208. After more than one year of background measurement, a surface activity of the scintillators of A((TI)-T-208) = 1.5 μBq/m(2) is reported here. Given this level of background, a larger BiPo detector having 12 m(2) of active surface area, is able to qualify the radiopurity of the SuperNEMO selenium double beta decay foils with the required sensitivity of A((TI)-T-208) <2 μBq/kg (90% CL.) with a six month measurement.

Abstract: A novel experimental setup to measure deviations from the 1/r(2) distance dependence of Newtonian gravity was proposed in Donini and Marimon (Eur Phys J C 76:696, 2016). The underlying theoretical idea was to study the orbits of a microscopically-sized planetary system composed of a “Satellite”, with mass m(S) similar to O(10-9) g, and a “Planet”, with mass M-P similar to O(10-5) g at an initial distance of hundreds of microns. The detection of precession of the orbit in this system would be an unambiguous indication of a central potential with terms that scale with the distance differently from 1/r. This is a huge advantage with respect to the measurement of the absolute strength of the attraction between two bodies, as most electrically-induced background potentials do indeed scale as 1/r. Detection of orbit precession is unaffected by these effects, allowing for better sensitivities. In Baeza-Ballesteros et al. (Eur Phys J C 82:154, 2022), the impact of other subleading backgrounds that may induce orbit precession, such as, e.g., the electrical Casimir force or general relativity, was studied in detail. It was found that the proposed setup could test Yukawa-like corrections, alpha x exp(-r/lambda), to the 1/r potential with couplings as low as alpha similar to 10(-2) for distances as small as lambda similar to 10 μm, improving by roughly an order of magnitude present bounds. In this paper, we start to move from a theoretical study of the proposal to a more realistic implementation of the experimental setup. As a first step, we study the impact of air viscosity on the proposed setup and see how the setup should be modified in order to preserve the theoretical sensitivity achieved in Donini and Marimon (2016) and Baeza-Ballesteros et al. (2022).

Abstract: The “Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon Time-Projection Chamber” (NEXT) is intended to investigate the neutrinoless double beta decay of Xe-136, 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 x 10(-4) counts keV(-1) kg(-1) y(-1), have been identified.