%0 Journal Article
%T Mitigation of backgrounds from cosmogenic Xe-137 in xenon gas experiments using He-3 neutron capture
%A NEXT Collaboration
%A Carcel, S.
%A Carrion, J. V.
%A Felkai, R.
%A Kekic, M.
%A Lopez-March, N.
%A Martin-Albo, J.
%A Martinez, A.
%A Martinez-Lema, G.
%A Muñoz Vidal, J.
%A Novella, P.
%A Palmeiro, B.
%A Querol, M.
%A Romo-Luque, C.
%A Sorel, M.
%A Uson, A.
%A Yahlali, N.
%J Journal of Physics G
%D 2020
%V 47
%N 7
%I Iop Publishing Ltd
%@ 0954-3899
%G English
%F NEXTCollaboration_etal2020
%O WOS:000537753800001
%O exported from refbase (https://references.ific.uv.es/refbase/show.php?record=4423), last updated on Wed, 18 May 2022 07:43:14 +0000
%X 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.
%K gaseous detectors
%K scintillators
%K scintillation and light emission processes
%K solid
%K gas and liquid scintillators
%R 10.1088/1361-6471/ab8915
%U https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.11147
%U https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6471/ab8915
%P 075001-17pp