Liquid-phase purification for multi-tonne xenon detectors

G. Plante; E. Aprile; J. Howlett; Y. Zhang

doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10832-w

EPJ

a
b
c
d
e
ap
st
h
plus
ds
pv
ti
qt
am
n

2023 Impact factor 4.2

Particles and Fields

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. C (2022) 82: 860
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10832-w

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Liquid-phase purification for multi-tonne xenon detectors

G. Plante, E. Aprile, J. Howlett^c and Y. Zhang

Physics Department, Columbia University, 10027, New York, NY, USA

^c joseph.howlett@columbia.edu

Received: 18 May 2022
Accepted: 21 September 2022
Published online: 2 October 2022

Abstract

As liquid xenon detectors grow in scale, novel techniques are required to maintain sufficient purity for charges to survive across longer drift paths. The Xeclipse facility at Columbia University was built to test the removal of electronegative impurities through cryogenic filtration powered by a liquid xenon pump, enabling a far higher mass flow rate than gas-phase purification through heated getters. In this paper, we present results from Xeclipse, including measured oxygen removal rates for two sorbent materials, which were used to guide the design and commissioning of the XENONnT liquid purification system. Thanks to this innovation, XENONnT has achieved an electron lifetime greater than $10 ms$ ${10}\,\hbox {ms}$ in an $\sim 8.6 tonne$ $\sim {8.6}{\text {tonne}}$ total mass, perhaps the highest purity ever measured liquid xenon detector.

© The Author(s) 2022

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.