NEXT Collaboration, Carcel, S., Carrion, J. V., Felkai, R., Kekic, M., Lopez-March, N., et al. (2020). Mitigation of backgrounds from cosmogenic Xe-137 in xenon gas experiments using He-3 neutron capture. J. Phys. G, 47(7), 075001–17pp.
Abstract: Xe-136 is used as the target medium for many experiments searching for 0 nu beta beta. Despite underground operation, cosmic muons that reach the laboratory can produce spallation neutrons causing activation of detector materials. A potential background that is difficult to veto using muon tagging comes in the form of Xe-137 created by the capture of neutrons on Xe-136. This isotope decays via beta decay with a half-life of 3.8 min and a Q(beta) of similar to 4.16 MeV. This work proposes and explores the concept of adding a small percentage of He-3 to xenon as a means to capture thermal neutrons and reduce the number of activations in the detector volume. When using this technique we find the contamination from Xe-137 activation can be reduced to negligible levels in tonne and multi-tonne scale high pressure gas xenon neutrinoless double beta decay experiments running at any depth in an underground laboratory.
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Fernandez, A., Hufschmidt, D., Colaux, J. L., Valiente-Dobon, J. J., Godinho, V., Jimenez de Haro, M. C., et al. (2020). Low gas consumption fabrication of He-3 solid targets for nuclear reactions. Mater. Des., 186, 108337–10pp.
Abstract: Nanoporous solids that stabilize trapped gas nanobubbles open new possibilities to fabricate solid targets for nuclear reactions. A methodology is described based on the magnetron sputtering (MS) technique operated under quasistatic flux conditions to produce such nanocomposites films with He-3 contents of up to 16 at.% in an amorphous-silicon matrix. In addition to the characteristic low pressure (3-6 Pa) needed for the gas discharge, the method ensures almost complete reduction of the process gas flow during film fabrication. The method could produce similar materials to those obtained under classical dynamic flux conditions for MS. The drastic reduction (>99.5%) of the gas consumption is fundamental for the fabrication of targets with scarce and expensive gases. Si:He-3 and W:He-3 targets are presented together with their microstructural (scanning and transmission electron microscopy, SEM and TEM respectively) and compositional (Ion Beam Analysis, IBA) characterization. The He-3 content achieved was over 1 x 10(18) at/cm(2) for film thicknesses between 1.5 and 3 μm for both Si and W matrices. First experiments to probe the stability of the targets for nuclear reaction studies in inverse kinematics configurations are presented.
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