Description
Chairs: Aldo Ianni & Jeter Hall
Due to its optical and electrical properties polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is an important construction material for many rare event searches. The radioactive contamination of PTFE thus needs to be as low as possible. We present a cross-sectional study investigating the radioactive contamination of PTFE samples from major European suppliers of raw PTFE. The bulk contaminations of the samples...
Rare event search experiments mostly placed inside underground laboratories demand very accurate measurements of ambient radiation contribution from charged cosmic particles from radioactive decay and nuclear processes in the surrounding rock components. Therefore careful analysis of rock components and specific background measurement experiments along with simulation studies form the first...
The Cryogenic Underground TEst Facility (CUTE) is fully operational in the low-radioactivity environment of the SNOLAB Underground Laboratory. Estimation of the background from radioactive processes via Geant4 simulation is crucial in informing the background budget for the facility. The radioactive background characterization of the CUTE facility will be presented along with the background...
The radiopurity.org database has proven to be a valuable resource for the low background physics community as a tool to track and share assay results. This talk will describe recent collaborative efforts between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and SNOLAB to modernize the database for the community. Improvements to the search utility and data upload methods will be discussed....
Surface and bulk contamination with long-lived daughters of $^{222}$Rn is of great interest for most of the experiments looking for rare events. These include detection of low energy solar neutrinos, searches for neutrino-less double beta decay or searches for dark matter. Decays of $^{210}$Pb, $^{210}$Bi and finally $^{210}$Po may contribute significantly to the experiments’ background...
The VIP experiment aims to perform high sensitivity tests of the Pauli Exclusion Principle (PEP) for electrons, and look for a possible small violation.
In Local Quantum Field Theories approach any PEP violating transition is strongly constrained by the Messiah Greenberg Superselection (MGS) rule, which forbids superpositions of states with different symmetry. Such models can then be only...
In the cosmic silence of the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory, where 1400 m of rock shield the experimental halls from external radiation, the LUNA experiment is able to recreate the processes that occurred during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the ones that still occur in stars today. Among the reactions recently studied at LUNA there is a key process of BBN: the reaction by which a...
