The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR will search for the neutrinoless double-beta decay of the isotope Ge with a mixed array of enriched and natural germanium detectors. The observation of this rare decay would indicate that the neutrino is its own antiparticle, demonstrate that lepton number is not conserved, and provide information on the absolute mass scale of the neutrino. The DEMONSTRATOR is being assembled at the 4850-foot level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. The array will be situated in a low-background environment and surrounded by passive and active shielding. Here we describe the science goals of the DEMONSTRATOR and the details of its design.

The Majorana Demonstrator Neutrinoless Double-beta Decay Experiment

Paleodetectors are a proposed experimental technique in which one would search for traces of recoiling nuclei in ancient minerals. Natural minerals on Earth are as old as O(1) Gyr and, in many mine ...

Paleodetectors for Galactic supernova neutrinos

Methods of analysis of natural and anthropogenic radionuclides in the marine environment are reviewed. Emphasis is given on preconcentration and separation chemistry for the preparation of seawater, sediment, and biota samples for alpha-, beta-, and gamma-spectrometry, including installations in underground laboratories. Applications of in situ underwater gamma-spectrometry for seabed mapping, radionuclide time-series measurements, and investigations of seawater–groundwater interactions in coastal regions are presented. Techniques for the analysis of natural radionuclides (U, Th, and Ra isotopes, 234 Th, 210 Pb, 210 Po) are reviewed, including their applications in water column and sediment dynamics studies. The state of the art of mass spectrometry technologies (AMS, ICPMS, TIMS, and RIMS) are presented, and future trends and developments approaching a single atom counting, and transfer from a bulk sample to compound-specific analyses are discussed. Techniques for the analysis of radionuclides present on micro-particles (SIMS, SEM, XRF, μ-XRF, μ-XANES, and XAF) are reviewed with implications for safeguards, radioecology, and speciation studies. Results of worldwide marine radioactivity investigations carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency – Environment Laboratories in Monaco document the usefulness of radionuclides as marine tracers, important for a better understanding of oceanographic processes and climate change.

Marine Radioactivity Analysis

Throughout the Universe we measure the gravitational effect of dark matter (DM). This DM makes up around 63% of the total matter in the Universe today and cannot be explained by the normal fundamental particles we know about already. Instead we believe there may be other particles that interact so weakly with normal matter that their effects are extremely hard to measure. Searching for DM is a difficult task requiring theoretical understanding of possible signals, unprecedented experimental sensitivity, and rigorous statistical methods to interpret the results. In this thesis we first create and test new statistical methods that are computational efficient and maintain accuracy even in the Poissonian regime. We then apply these new techniques to the direct detection (DD) of DM - the process of searching for the energy left behind on the rare occasion that DM interacts with normal matter. Unfortunately, these DD experiments are becoming increasingly expensive and complex. We therefore turned to a new DD method that, instead of looking for DM-nucleon interactions in real time, uses ancient minerals from underground to look for the cumulative effect of these interactions over time. We showed that these minerals, called paleo-detectors, could be dramatically more sensitive than current DD experiments and robust to unknown background components such as radioactivity. Finally, we turned to neutrino interactions in these minerals. In particular, we showed that paleo-detectors could potentially discover the emission of neutrinos from supernovae within our galaxy over the past one billion years.

Probing new physics underground

The most sensitive technologies for ultra-low-level analyses of long-lived radionuclides have been accelerator mass spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, reaching detection limits about 1 nBq/g. Together with underground operation of large volume HPGe detectors they have had great impact on underground physics experiments, approaching new frontiers in radioanalytics—a single atom counting.

Ultra-sensitive radionuclide analyses: new frontiers in radioanalytics

Assessment of radioactive contamination of construction materials used in deep underground experiments has been carried out using ultra-sensitive analytical methods such as radiometrics, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS), accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), and neutron activation analysis. The lowest detection limits, < 1 nBq g−1, has been obtained with ICPMS and AMS techniques.

Ultra-sensitive radioanalytical technologies for underground physics experiments

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Ultra-sensitive radioanalytical technologies for underground physics experiments