Conveners
Mitigation of Surface Contamination
- Pia Loaiza (IJCLab CNRS/Université Paris Saclay)
Rigorous radioactive background constraints are necessary for rare-event search experiments to meet their sensitivity goals. Underground facilities provide ideal attenuation of cosmic radiation, shielding materials around the detectors are used to mitigate backgrounds from surrounding rocks and extensive radioassay campaigns are performed to source the most radiopure materials. To reduce the...
The traces of radioactivity present in the materials used to construct low background detectors can contribute to the dominant background signal for rare event search experiments. The surface contamination of detector materials is part of this significant source of background, primarily due to radon diffusion and plate-out of radon daughters. Exposure to environmental Rn during fabrication,...
The Boulby UnderGround Screening (BUGS) facility has significantly enhanced its material screening capabilities by integrating an XIA UltraLo-1800 alpha particle detector and developing an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) setup. This contribution presents key findings from both techniques, highlighting their importance for minimising background interference in rare-event...
