Related papers: Improving radioactive contaminant identification t…
Localization and modeling of radioactive contaminations is a challenge that ultra-low background experiments are constantly facing. These are fundamental steps both to extract scientific results and to further reduce the background of the…
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…
Material screening for identifying low-energy electron emitters and alpha-decaying isotopes is now a prerequisite for rare-event searches (e.g., dark-matter direct detection and neutrinoless double-beta decay) for which surface…
Low counting experiments (search for double $\beta$ decay and dark matter particles, measurements of neutrino fluxes from different sources, search for hypothetical nuclear and subnuclear processes, low background $\alpha$, $\beta$,…
This article describes a new experimental method for accelerator based neutrino experiments called neutrino tagging. The method consists in exploiting the neutrino production mechanism, the $\pi^{\pm}\to\mu^{\pm}\nu_\mu$ decay, to…
Inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy is a powerful technique for measuring trace levels of radioactive contaminants, specifically Th and U, in materials for use in construction of low-background rare-event detectors such as double…
We discuss an experimental technique aimed at tagging electron neutrinos in multi-GeV artificial sources on an event-by-event basis. It exploits in a novel manner calorimetric and tracking technologies developed in the framework of the LHC…
We describe an approach to the study of neutrino masses that combines quantum optics techniques with radiation detectors to obtain unprecedented sensitivity. With it the search for Majorana neutrino masses down to $\sim$10 meV will become…
We have developed a novel detector, referred to as an "$\alpha$-ToF detector", for correlated measurements of atomic masses and decay properties of low-yield, short-lived radioactive isotopes using a multi-reflection time-of-flight mass…
A method is proposed, based on scan statistics, to detect, identify, and localize illicit radiological material using mobile sensors in an urban environment. Our method handles varying levels of background radiation that change according to…
Radioactivity is understood to be described by a Poisson process, yet some measurements of nuclear decays appear to exhibit unexpected variations. Generally, the isotopes reporting these variations have long half lives, which are plagued by…
We present measurements of radioactive contamination in the high-resistivity silicon charge-coupled devices (CCDs) used by the DAMIC experiment to search for dark matter particles. Novel analysis methods, which exploit the unique spatial…
We present the development of a decay energy spectroscopy (DES) method for the analysis of radioactive impurities using magnetic microcalorimeters (MMCs). The DES system was designed to analyze radionuclides, such as Ra-226, Th-228, and…
Radioactivity was recently discovered as a source of decoherence and correlated errors for the real-world implementation of superconducting quantum processors. In this work, we measure levels of radioactivity present in a typical laboratory…
In this work, the $^{222}$Rn contamination mechanisms on acrylic surfaces have been investigated. $^{222}$Rn can represent a significant background source for low-background experiments, and acrylic is a suitable material for detector…
High-quality radio frequency (RF) components are imperative for efficient wireless communication. However, these components can degrade over time and need to be identified so that either they can be replaced or their effects can be…
During the recent years, at the FLNR a successful cycle of experiments has been accomplished on the synthesis of the superheavy elements with Z=112 to Z=118 using 48Ca ion beam. From the viewpoint of the detection of rare decays and…
Four methods for determining the composition of low-level uranium- and thorium-chain surface contamination are presented. One method is the observation of Cherenkov light production in water. In two additional methods a position-sensitive…
We want to detect whether a particular image dataset has been used to train a model. We propose a new technique, \emph{radioactive data}, that makes imperceptible changes to this dataset such that any model trained on it will bear an…
The beta-decay of $\rm^{85}Kr$ is a significant radioactive background for experiments that use liquified noble gases to search for dark matter and measure the low-energy solar neutrino flux. While there are several proposed methods for…