Once a year the Spring-Meeting of the German Physics Society (DPG “Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschafft”) takes place. This year I had the opportunity to talk about the planned neutron Veto for XENONnT in Würzburg (19.-23.3.2018).
In order to maximize the fiducial volume, we want to veto nuclear recoils. Therefore we are working on a neutron veto system based on Gadolinium loaded liquid scintillator. The plan is to use acrylic boxes, which can be filled with liquid scintillator before being placed around the TPC cryostat.
Building on the experience of DOUBLE CHOOZ, we developed a first LAB-based liquid scintillator doped with 0.1 % Gadolinium and two wavelength shifters. Three measurements were performed to test the optical properties, transmission, emission and relative light yield. From the transmission measurement, we learned that the attenuation length of the scintillator at a wavelength of 430nm is 7.1m. The emission measurement shows the shifting due to the wavelength shifters to the visible wavelength. And with the relative light yield measurement we can compare an unloaded scintillator sample with the Gd-loaded sample. The light yield for the loaded scintillator decreases to 74% of the unloaded sample.
Our next steps will be to find a supplier who can provide us with a large and pure amount of the Gadolinium-Complex and to build a setup for neutron tagging measurements.