Related papers: Improving the Limits of Detection of Low Backgroun…
Alpha emissivity measurements are important in the semiconductor industry for assessing the suitability of materials for use in production processes. A recently published round-robin study that circulated the same samples to several alpha…
Ground-based observations at thermal infrared wavelengths suffer from large background radiation due to the sky, telescope and warm surfaces in the instrument. This significantly limits the sensitivity of ground-based observations at…
To reduce background in experiments looking for rare events, such as the GERDA double beta decay experiment, it is necessary to employ active background-suppression techniques. One of such techniques is the pulse shape analysis of signals…
A new ionisation chamber for alpha-spectroscopy has been built from radio-pure materials for the purpose of investigating long lived alpha-decays. The measurement makes use of pulse shape analysis to discriminate between signal and…
An important issue for rare-event-search experiments, such as the search for dark matter or neutrinoless double beta decay, is to reduce radioactivity of the detector materials and the experimental environment. The selection of materials…
Commercial alpha counters are used in science and industry applications to screen materials for surface radon progeny contamination. In this paper, we characterize an XIA UltraLo-1800, an ionization drift alpha counter, and study the…
The next generation of cosmology space missions will be sensitive to parasitic signals arising from cosmic rays. Using a composite bolometer, we have investigated pulses produced by $\alpha$ particles in order to understand the movement of…
The decay of common radioactive gases, such as radon, produces stable isotopes by a sequence of daughter particles with varied half-lives. These daughter particles are a significant source of gamma, neutron, and alpha particle backgrounds…
Experiments searching for rare processes like neutrinoless double beta decay heavily rely on the identification of background events to reduce their background level and increase their sensitivity. We present a novel machine learning based…
The Boulby UnderGround Screening (BUGS) facility, located at the Boulby Underground Laboratory, has significantly advanced its material screening capabilities by installing two XIA UltraLo-1800 alpha particle detectors. This study presents…
State-of-the-art techniques to identify H\alpha emission line sources in narrow-band photometric surveys consist of searching for H\alpha excess with reference to nearby objects in the sky (position-based selection). However, while this…
In astronomy, spectroscopy consists of observing an astrophysical source and extracting its spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Once extracted, a model is fit to the spectra to measure the observables, leading to an understanding of the…
Ionization chambers working in ambient air in current detection mode are widely used in several applications such as smoke detection, dosimetry, therapeutic beam monitoring and cetera. The aim of this work was to investigate if gaseous…
We present radio transient search algorithms, results, and statistics from the ongoing Arecibo Pulsar ALFA (PALFA) Survey of the Galactic plane. We have discovered seven objects by detecting isolated dispersed pulses and one of the new…
Dual-phase xenon detectors, as currently used in direct detection dark matter experiments, have observed elevated rates of background electron events in the low energy region. While this background negatively impacts detector performance in…
Alpha emission from actinide impurities in Al is a source of background counting rate in Multi-Grid type detectors of thermal neutrons. The alpha emission rates from samples of radio-purity Al and \mathrm{Al/B_{4}C} composite, used in grid…
Astrometric surveys offer us a method to search for elusive cosmic signatures, such as ultralight dark photon dark matter and gravitational waves, by observing the deflection to the apparent positions of the stars. The detection…
Direction sensitivity could provide robust evidence for the direct detection of weakly interacting massive particles constituting dark matter. However, the sensitivity of this method remains low due to the radioactive backgrounds. The…
Development of ultra low background gas proportional counters has made the contribution from naturally occurring radioactive isotopes -- primarily $\alpha$ and $\beta$ activity in the uranium and thorium decay chains -- inconsequential to…
Low radioactive material screening is becoming essential for rare event search experiments, such as neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter searches in underground laboratories. A gaseous time projection chamber (TPC) can be used for…