XENONnT reaches world-record low in radon background
The XENONnT collaboration has achieved a breakthrough in reducing radon-related background in their dark matter research, achieving levels comparable to solar neutrino activity.
The XENONnT collaboration has hit a groundbreaking milestone in their relentless efforts of mitigating their experimental backgrounds in their search for dark matter. A major hurdle is the background from radon and its decay products, which are omnipresent in trace amounts in nearly all materials and have long been a dominant source of background noise in the hunt for rare events. In a recent paper published in Physical Review X which got also featured in Physics, the team details their innovative use of a high-flow cryogenic distillation facility allowing to separate their xenon from the radon, resutling in a four fold reduction in the radon background. For the first time, they have achieved radon-induced background activities which are comparable to those from solar neutrinos. This remarkable advancement is set to improve their rare-event searches and enhance the sensitivity of future liquid xenon detectors.