PT Journal
AU NEXT Collaboration
   Carcel, S
   Carrion, JV
   Felkai, R
   Kekic, M
   Lopez-March, N
   Martin-Albo, J
   Martinez, A
   Martinez-Lema, G
   Muñoz Vidal, J
   Novella, P
   Palmeiro, B
   Querol, M
   Romo-Luque, C
   Sorel, M
   Uson, A
   Yahlali, N
TI Mitigation of backgrounds from cosmogenic Xe-137 in xenon gas experiments using He-3 neutron capture
SO Journal of Physics G
JI J. Phys. G
PY 2020
BP 075001
EP 17pp
VL 47
IS 7
DI 10.1088/1361-6471/ab8915
LA English
DE gaseous detectors; scintillators; scintillation and light emission processes; solid; gas and liquid scintillators
AB 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.
ER