Conveners
Underground laboratories: parallel session 1
- Sean Paling
Underground laboratories: parallel session 2
- Silvia SCORZA (CNRS/LPSC Grenoble)
Underground laboratories: parallel session 3
- Jodi Cooley
Underground laboratories: parallel session 4
- Silvia SCORZA (CNRS/LPSC Grenoble)
- Laura Cardani
Underground laboratories: parallel talks 5
- Paolo Gorla (Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso - INFN)
Underground laboratories: parallel talks 6
- Laura Cardani
China Jinping underground Lab(CJPL) is the deepest underground laboratory with a rock overburden of 2400m. Now there are two phase in CJPL. CJPL-I is used for demonstration of CDEX, PandaX and low-background facility. A deep Underground and ultra-low Radiation background Facility for frontier physics experiments(DURF) was built in CJPL-II since Feb. 2020. The civil engineering of CJPL-II...
Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) of INFN are one the most important research center for astro-particle physics. Since the late 1980s, the role, results and international impact of LNGS have been constantly growing. Every year over a thousand scientists, from the most renowned universities and research institutions in the world, come to LNGS to participate in experiments.
The study...
SNOLAB is Canada's deep underground laboratory, which has been fully operational since 2012. SNOLAB is operated 2 kilometers below ground in an active nickel mine, and the partnership with the local mine poses both opportunities and challenges. We will describe the operational capabilities, scientific program, and infrastructure challenges over the past decade and in the future.
The underground ultra-low background laboratory STELLA (SubTerranean Low Level Assay) in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (LNGS-INFN) is principally dedicated to material screening measurements for fundamental physics experiments installed in the underground laboratories. It is mainly using gamma-ray spectrometry, but also alpha and beta...
Experiments studying rare event searches, such as dark matter interactions and neutrinoless double beta decay, require ultra-low levels of radioactive backgrounds in their own construction materials, shielding and in the surrounding environment. As the next generation of experiments are becoming even more sensitive, material selection has become one of the most crucial components of the design...
The Nuova Officina Assergi (NOA) is a functional Research and Technological Unit operational at LNGS since autumn 2022. Conceived and built within the framework of the DarkSide-20k experiment, it is the most advanced infrastructure flagship of the INFN, for the production and integration of silicon devices operating at cryogenic temperatures. It consists of a ISO6 clean room of 420 m2 designed...
The Online Scintillator Internal Radioactivity Investigation System is an 18-ton pre-detector of JUNO, currently under commissioning in south-west China. During the 6-month filling phase of the JUNO main detector, it will be responsible for the monitoring of the radiopurity of the liquid scintillator filled into the JUNO central detector. Fast 214/212Bi/214/212Po coincidences serve as a main...
PandaX is a set of xenon-based time projection chambers designed for detecting rare events such as dark matter and neutrino interactions. Background control is a crucial aspect of these searches. For material screening, we utilized HPGe, ICP-MS, and NAA techniques, as well as custom-built krypton, radon-emanation, and alpha measurement systems. In this report, we present our radioassay program...
The DarkSide-20k experiment searches for dark matter by looking for interactions of WIMPs in a 50 tonnes target of liquid argon using double-phase time projection chamber technology. The key component of the experiment is low radioactivity argon depleted in the isotope $^{39}$Ar.
The supply chain begins with the Urania plant in Colorado, which can produce argon at a purity of 99.99% from a...
Rigorous radioactive background constraints are necessary for rare-event search experiments to meet their sensitivity goals. Underground facilities provide ideal attenuation of cosmic radiation, shielding materials around the detectors are used to mitigate backgrounds from soil, and extensive radioassay campaigns are performed to source the most radiopure materials. To reduce the impact of...
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....
The Yemilab, a new deep underground laboratory, has been constructed to be located under the Yemi mountain at the Jeongseon in Korea. The overburden is 1,000 m from the top of the Yemi mountain which may provide 5 times better muon mitigation than Y2L, and the laboratory area is approximately 3,000 m^2 which is 10 times larger than Y2L. We can access the laboratory using a cage that has 4 m/s...
The Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) has been operating for more than 15 years as an international facility dedicated to advancing compelling multidisciplinary underground scientific research in rare-process physics, as well as offering research opportunities in other disciplines. SURF laboratory facilities include a Surface Campus as well as campuses at the 4850-foot level (1500...
The Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane is the deepest tunnel-access underground laboratory in Europe. The experimental site is protected by a 4800 mwe overburden that reduce the muon flux to 5 muons/m2/day, and is thus ideal for a wide range of applications requiring ultra-low radioactivity levels. We will present the evolution of this facility and of its science program in the domain of Dark...
In the past years there has been a growing interest in superconducting qubits. This technology, other than being one of the most promising ones for the realization of quantum computers, has also applications for particle detectors. Detectors relying on superconducting qubits are already being used to search for light dark matter candidates such as hidden photons or axions.
As the technology...
Ionizing radiation has been shown to have deleterious effects on superconducting qubit performance, particularly by generating correlated errors in multiple qubits, which is particularly problematic for quantum error correction codes. To better study the effects of ionizing radiation on superconducting qubits and sensors, we have recently installed a dilution refrigerator in the Shallow...
JUNO is building a 20 kt liquid scintillator (LS) detector at a depth of 700 m underground, and the radioactive control of the environment is very important. The whole underground space at JUNO site is about 300,000 m3, including the main hall of 120,000 m3 and a number of attached halls and tunnels, making it the largest underground laboratory in the world. Since the laboratory is located...
This work summarize different approaches that were carried out in the Modane Underground Laboratory (LSM). In this work the simulation of Radon daughter implantation on different surfaces is presented. The work compares a Geant4 based approach to the SRIM code . This lies in the simulation of the nucllear recoil on a metal plate. The different materials are tested respectively to radon...
Many physics goals of future large LAr detectors like DUNE hinge on the achievement of high radiopurity to minimize backgrounds to low-energy signals like supernova and solar neutrinos. Radon in particular is a concerning source of backgrounds, as its progeny generate diffuse signals from betas, gammas, and neutrons at the MeV-scale. In this talk, we report a measured limit on the specific...
Underground physics has been conducted at the Pyhäsalmi mine in Finland for over 20 years and it was one of the sites in FP7 LAGUNA and LAGUNA LBNO design studies. In 2016, the University of Oulu established the Callio Lab multidisciplinary research centre, which began coordinating scientific activities on-site. Since then, we have hosted and conducted research in disciplines ranging from...
Boulby Underground Laboratory is the UK’s deep underground science facility and one of the few special facilities in the world suited to studies requiring ultra-low background radiation experimental space and/or general access to the deep underground environment. Boulby operates in a working polyhalite and salt mine in the North East of England and hosts a range of science from astroparticle...
The Southern hemisphere offers a wonderful opportunity for scientists to explore unique initiatives offered by a low level radiation facility. Establishing a deep underground physics laboratory to study, amongst others, double beta decay, geo-neutrinos, reactor neutrinos and dark matter has been discussed for more than a decade within the austral African physicists’ community. The...
Neutrons constitute a significant source of experimental background in rare event searches carried out in underground laboratories. In order to accurately estimate the background contributions affecting these experiments, it is essential to possess a thorough understanding of the underground neutron flux. To that end the High Efficiency Neutron Spectrometry Array (HENSA) has been...
The aim of the Archimedes experiment is the evaluation of the interactions between vacuum energy and gravity. The vacuum energy will be weighted by a very precise balance measuring the arm tilts by the mean of interferometric readout. The experiment needs a quiet place, for this reason, the final Archimedes balance is under construction directly at the Sar-Grav laboratory in Sardinia. The...
The scientific objective of Archimedes is to weigh the vacuum, i.e. to investigate the role of the interaction of vacuum fluctuations with the force of gravity, using a high sensitivity balance. It will measure the small weight variations induced in two high temperature superconductors that have the property of "trapping" or "expelling" vacuum energy when their temperatures are greater or...
The CNO-cycle is the dominant hydrogen burning process in stars above a temperature of 17 million Kelvin. The $^{12}$C(p,$\gamma$)$^{13}$N reaction rate is dominating the rate of this cycle in the initial phase and in the outer shells of the burning zone. Furthermore, this reaction affects the abundance ratios of $^{12}$C to $^{13}$C in stars with masses slightly above solar mass. The cross...
The 3He(α,γ)7Be reaction plays a role in two distinct astrophysical scenarios, solar fusion as well as Big Bang nucleosynthesis. The nuclear reaction cross section (expressed as astrophysical S-factor) of this reaction has been studied several times for energies E > 0.3MeV and once for energies between 0.1MeV and 0.2MeV, but never directly for energies below 0.1MeV. The energies below the...
At astrophysical energies the cross sections of nuclear processes are usually very small and cosmogenic background prevents their measurement on the Earth surface. Deep underground in the Gran Sasso Laboratory, crucial reactions involved in hydrogen burning has been measured directly at astrophysical energies by the LUNA (Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics) Collaboration with both...
The question whether an annual modulation is observable during nuclear decay rate measurements has long been the subject of research. One of the possible explanations for the annual variations would be the effect of solar neutrinos, the flux of which changes in correlation with the Earth-Sun distance. A decay rate measurement with a 137Cs source and a HPGe detector is currently being conducted...
