Speaker
Dr
Michael Febbraro
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Description
Progress in the fields of neutrino physics and dark matter searches have placed extreme demands for ultra-low background sensitivities. These improvements can be achieved by replacing inactive structural components with transparent, radio-pure plastic scintillators. These structural scintillating components can serve as an active veto, discriminating internal events of interest from external background events. Poly(ethylene-2,6-naphthalate) (PEN) has been identified as an ideal material for structural scintillator components as it has a significant yield strength at cryogenic temperatures, functions as a wavelength shifter for liquid argon-based detectors, scintillating in the 400 nm region. This presentation will describe efforts to produce and characterize low background components for rare event physics experiments and will provide an update on the synthesis efforts of PEN and PEN derivatives at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics. Research sponsored by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Primary author
Dr
Michael Febbraro
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Co-authors
Dr
Bela Majorovits
(Max Planck Institute for Physics)
Ms
Brennan Hackett
(University of Tennessee)
Mr
Conner Hayward
(Lancaster University)
Prof.
Daniel Muenstermann
(Lancaster University)
Dr
David Radford
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Mr
Felix Fisher
(Max Planck Institute for Physics)
Dr
Markus Pohl
(TU Dortmund)
Dr
Oliver Schulz
(Max Planck Institute for Physics)
Mr
Rami Rouhana
(TU Dortmund)
Prof.
Yuri Efremenko
(University of Tennessee)
