Erlangen 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 36: Search for Dark Matter II

T 36.2: Vortrag

Dienstag, 17. März 2026, 16:30–16:45, AM 00.014

Radon removal by cryogenic distillation for future liquid xenon detectors — •Robert Braun, Lutz Althueser, David Koke, Volker Hannen, Christian Huhmann, Ying-Ting Lin, Philipp Schulte, Patrick Unkhoff, Daniel Wenz, and Christian Weinheimer — Universität Münster

Radon emanation from detector materials is a dominant background source in liquid xenon (LXe) detectors used for rare event searches including dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay. Because of the continuous emanation of radon it is necessary to remove radon faster than its half-life of 3.8 days in order to effectively reduce the radon concentration of the detector itself. For the large detector masses of next generation LXe experiments (e.g. XLZD) this requirement corresponds to a total xenon flow of up to 1600 kg/h, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than those achieved by current systems of about 80 kg/h.

In the LowRAD project a cryogenic distillation setup is developed for reducing the concentration of radon to unprecedented levels. To investigate the scalability of the system, the required heating and cooling power is provided by an hermetically separated heat pump cycle, for which a first demonstrator with about 10 slpm is now scaled to a "XENONnT-sized" heat pump with 300 slpm. This talk will present the design and commissioning of the radon distillation column and its subsystems, with a particular emphasis on the integrated radon-decay detector enabling continuous online monitoring of radon concentrations. Supported by the ERC Advanced Grant "LowRad" (101055063).

Keywords: liquid xenon; cryogenic distillation; radon detection; heat pump