Speaker
Liangming Hu
(Brookhaven National Laboratory and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
Description
The experimental tool for LENS is charged-current capture of a neutrino on 115In, with prompt emission of an electron and delayed emission of 2 gamma rays that serve as a time and space coincidence tag. The detection medium is liquid scintillator loaded with Indium. The LENS experiment requires approximately 10 tons of Indium to be loaded into 100,000 liters of organic scintillator, prepared via liquid-liquid extraction from aqueous solutions of inorganic In compounds. The key properties of the scintillator are high metal loading (8-10%), long attenuation length at 430nm (>8m), high scintillation yield, stability on the scale of 5 years, and low environmental and health hazards in an underground environment. These goals are reached by careful pH balancing during the extraction and use of high purity front end liquids. The raw materials for the extraction must undergo purification and scrupulous quality control measures. We will present InLS recipes, liquid quality variations before/after purification measured via UV-Vis spectrometry and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). We will present results on the scintillation light yield and attenuation length of the final InLS. Two different solvents, psuedocumene (PC) and linear alkylbenzene (LAB) have been used to load the In metal and achieve satisfactory figures of merit.
*This work was funded by— the National Science Foundation, Virginia Tech, LA Board of Regents and LSU. Brookhaven National Laboratory is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy
Primary authors
Liangming Hu
(Brookhaven National Laboratory and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
S. Derek Rountree
(Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
