Potassium-40 ($^{40}$K) is a naturally-occurring, radioactive isotope of interest to rare-event searches as a challenging background. In particular, NaI scintillators contain $^{40}$K contamination which produces an irreducible $\sim $3 keV signal originating from this isotope's electron capture (EC) decays. In geochronology, the $\mathcal{O}(\text{Gy})$ lifetime of $^{40}$K is utilized in...
At the Isotope Separator and Accelerator (ISAC) facility of TRIUMF, an Electron Cyclotron Resonance Ion Source is used to charge breed radioactive ion beams before injection into the linear accelerator for post acceleration. The so-called Charge State Booster (CSB) has been used to charge breed radioactive isotopes ranging from potassium to erbium under the regime of single frequency heating...
The Pacific-Ocean Neutrino Explorer is a proposed multi-cubic kilometre
neutrino telescope to be located off the coast of British Columbia, Canada.
Two pathfinder missions, STRAW and STRAW-B, have been deployed to
the Cascadian Basin site, which uses existing infrastructure maintained by
Ocean Networks Canada (ONC). These missions were deployed in order to
characterise the site. The first...
The proposed neutrino detector HALO-1kT will be used to detect neutrinos
from core-collapse supernova events and will contribute to our
understanding of the stars’ explosion mechanism. Its detection method is
based on neutrinos interacting with lead nuclei which then emit neutrons
that can be detected through helium counters. However, neutrino-lead
cross sections at supernova energy scale...
A bubble chamber using fluorocarbons or liquid noble gases is a competitive technology to detect a low-energy nuclear recoil due to elastic scattering of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter. It consists of pressure and a temperature-controlled vessel filled with a liquid in the superheated state. Bubble nucleation from liquid to vapor phase can only occur if the energy...
A Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detector allows the identification of charged particles through the measurement of the emission angle of the Cherenkov light produced by the passage of particles with speeds greater than the speed of light in the detector medium. An Aerogel Ring Imaging Cherenkov (ARICH) device uses aerogel material as a radiator medium to achieve a desirable index of...
The SNO+ experiment is a multipurpose neutrino detector located 2 km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. The primary goal of the experiment is to search for neutrinoless double beta $(0\nu\beta\beta)$ decay in liquid scintillator loaded with $^{130}$Te in a low-background environment. An observation of a $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay signal would demonstrate the Majorana nature of neutrinos. ...
Water Cherenkov (WC) neutrino detectors, such as Super-Kamiokande (Super-K), employ an outer detector (OD) volume to veto out cosmic muons and other types of background, and to provide passive shielding and identify events that are not contained in the inner detector (ID). The upcoming Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K) experiment, a long-baseline neutrino facility to study oscillations and search...
SNO+ is a multipurpose neutrino detector located 2km underground which detects events inside the active liquid organic scintillating (LAB) medium. It is important to understand the radio-active backgrounds in the detector in detail to interpret any potential physics signals. C14 is a source of background events in the SNO+ detector, and can be observed homogeneously throughout the LAB in the...
SNOLAB has a low background gamma ray counting facility to screen materials for use in the next generation of Neutrinoless Double Beta decay and Dark Matter experiments. The low background is achieved through a 2 km depth underground, gamma ray shielding from the lab environment, and Radon reduction with Nitrogen purge gas. SNOLAB has acquired a new detector in collaboration with the Health...
Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) will be a next-generation neutrino detector. Following the successful T2K experiment, it will use a long-baseline neutrino beam to study neutrino oscillation and discover CP-phase violation in the lepton sector, among other goals. To characterize the unoscillated neutrino beam, the upcoming Intermediate Water-Cherenkov Detector (IWCD) will intercept the neutrino beam at...
High purity germanium (HPGe) p-type point contact (PPC) detectors are one of the ideal candidates for searching rare and low energy events, such as neutrinoless double beta decay and various dark matter candidates. We will report our studies on pulse shape characteristics and temperature dependency of a large segmented HPGe PPC detector. We will also discuss a machine learning algorithm in...
nEXO is an experiment currently under design to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay using 5000 of enriched Xe-136. nEXO’s sensitivity to the neutrinoless double beta decay halflife of $1.35 \times 10^{28}$ yr at the 90% confidence level, under an ultra-low background environment. This will be accomplished partly by the implementation of an Outer Detector (OD) which serves to shield the...
The nEXO experiment is being designed to search for neutrino-less double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) in a 5000 kg liquid xenon time projection chamber (TPC) enriched to the isotope xenon-136. nEXO's > 10$^{28}$ year sensitivity reach to the $0\nu\beta\beta$ half-life requires extremely low backgrounds from external sources. Backgrounds are dealt with in part by surrounding the TPC with an...
SNO+ is a 780 tonnes of liquid scintillator neutrino detector located at Sudbury, ON in Vale's Creighton mine. 2km of rock above reduce cosmic radiation and enable rare even searches. However, radioactive material in the rock can decay and produce radiation in the region of interest of SNO+. This presentation will show the results for the daughter of U238 in the rock: Rn222, which is part of...
The nEXO experiment is a proposed neutrinoless double beta decay (0$\nu\beta\beta$) search in the isotope $^{136}$Xe. Anticipated to be located at SNOLAB, nEXO aims to observe the Majorana nature of neutrinos with a sensitivity that will exclude up to a $1.35\times10^{28}$ year half life (at 90% confidence level) and probe the entire inverted mass hierarchy parameter space for almost all...
The EXO-200 experiment uses a liquid xenon (LXe) time projection chamber to search for neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$). The already observed two neutrino double beta decay ($2\nu\beta\beta$) mode, a second-order weak transition in which two neutrons simultaneously decay into two protons emitting two electrons and two antineutrinos, is a well-known process predicted by the...
The A2 Collaboration uses the Mainz Microtron to measure to conduct measurements probing hadron structure. An upcoming experiment will study Compton scattering off of helium-3 to obtain the polarizabilties of the neutron. To get a full picture of these events and reduce backgrounds, an active target is required. We intend to use a compact Time Projection Chamber (TPC) for this purpose, in...
The radiopurity.org database has proven to be a valuable resource for the low background physics community as a tool to track and share assay results. This talk will describe recent collaborative efforts between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and SNOLAB to modernize the database for the community. Improvements to the search utility and data upload methods will be discussed....
SNOLAB is one of the world’s deepest underground research facilities that specializes in Particle Physics research such as Neutrino Physics and Dark Matter Physics. These sensitive experiments are looking for physics signals that are extremely rare, one of the main concerns for these rare event experiments is the presence of backgrounds, which could mask the signals of interest. The 222Rn, one...
Inconsistencies between Standard Model (SM) predictions and various existing measurements point towards the potential violation of lepton flavor universality. The charged pion branching ratio to electrons vs muons $R_{e/\mu}$ is extremely sensitive to a wide variety of new physics effects, including those at very high mass scales, and is theoretically predicted to a precision 15 times better...
