Some of the most sensitive detectors used for low-background searches, such as dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay, are liquid xenon-based detectors. These require stringent background discrimination and mitigation, and silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) present a promising alternative to traditional photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) due to their lower levels of radioactivity. In order to...
Monitoring impurity levels within a noble liquid detector is essential for achieving precise energy measurements and for producing accurate detector simulations by including corrected light transport properties. PUMA (purity monitor assembly) is being developed at TRIUMF by the PIONEER group to monitor impurities in liquid xenon. PUMA can measure electronegative impurities, such as oxygen or...
Dark matter constitutes most of the universe's mass, yet its interactions remain elusive due to its weak coupling to the visible spectrum, necessitating innovative detection methods. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), are a promising dark matter candidate, and are theorized to interact with standard model particles via nuclear recoiling. At the forefront of investigating this...
To address the challenges of the "neutrino fog" in both high-mass and sub-GeV dark matter searches, a new cryogenic test facility is being commissioned at Queen’s University. This facility validates innovative technologies for the future Argo (300-tonne LAr) and DarkSide-LowMass experiments.
A primary focus is the characterization of digital Silicon Photomultipliers, developed by the...
Neutrinoless double beta decay (0𝜈𝛽𝛽) detection would shed light on whether neutrinos are Majorana or Dirac particles, however these measurements necessitate a high energy resolution. Xe-136 double beta decay into Ba-136 is a prime candidate for 0𝜈𝛽𝛽 detection, understanding the scintillation light this decay produces enhances 0𝜈𝛽𝛽 detection capabilities. Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) and...
The high-efficiency detection of vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) photons is essential to the operation of particle physics detectors employing LXe as a scintillator. Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) have been selected as the photon detector of choice for current LXe experiments such as MEG II, as well as future detectors such as nEXO and PIONEER, due to their high radiopurity, fast timing...
Accurate modelling of scintillation light transport is critical for the design, calibration, and reconstruction performance of ton-scale liquid xenon detectors. Current optical simulations tools based on CPU-driven Geant4 workflows are often slow to iterate on, with substantial start-up overhead, and quickly become computationally intractable with high statistics requirements.
We present a...
The MainzTPC is an experimental dual-phase xenon time projection chamber (TPC) dedicated to the study of scintillation and ionization processes in liquid xenon (LXe) for low-energy electronic and nuclear recoils. It has been designed to be the primary target in Compton and neutron scattering experiments to measure recoil energies in LXe down to $1$ keV.
To improve position resolution in $x$...
Barium tagging (“Ba-tagging”) has the potential to become a defining technology for next-generation liquid and gas xenon time projection chambers searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) in $^{136}$Xe. The successful identification of the $\beta\beta$-decay daughter $^{136}$Ba at the reconstructed decay site would provide an event-by-event confirmation of the parent...
Krypton-85 beta decay is a significant background for liquid-xenon time projection chambers used in dark-matter searches. As the concentration of krypton in xenon reaches lower levels in current and next-generation detectors, the direct measurement of trace krypton in xenon becomes increasingly challenging. I report on the development of an enhanced krypton-concentration measurement technique...
