SMuK 2021 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 25: Astroparticle Physics

HK 25.7: Talk

Thursday, September 2, 2021, 18:30–18:45, H4

Suppressing radon emanation by coating techniques — •Hardy Simgen, Florian Jörg, and Mona Piotter — Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik / Heidelberg

Radon-induced signals are a challenging source of background in most low-background experiments searching for rare events. The dominant radon source is emanation from detector materials, which contain traces of primordial uranium and thorium. While the problem is usually addressed by dedicated material screening and selection programs, novel radon mitigation techniques are required to fulfill the demanding needs of next-generation experiments.

In this talk we present our work on coating techniques to reduce radon emanation from metallic surfaces. A stable, tight and clean coating should reduce the radon emanation rate of materials significantly. Electro-deposition of copper turned out to be the most promising approach. We will discuss systematic studies of the parameters of our coating process and present achieved reduction factors for the emanation rate of the short-lived ²²⁰Rn. Practically more relevant is the emanation of ²²²Rn due to its much longer half-life. However, appropriate samples are hard to obtain. We present first results on the coating of a ²²²Rn-emanating stainless steel sample which was custom-produced at the ISOLDE facility at CERN.