Radon Emanation Analysis

Author: Seth Bendigo, Department of Physics

Mentor: Dr. Richard Schnee, Department of Physics

Highly sensitive experiments such as the LZ dark matter experiment have backgrounds due to radon emanating out of materials. The radon emanation system at SD Mines is used to reduce radon background by measuring the emanation rate of radon out of these materials. If the emanation rate is too high, those objects can be replaced. However, the system’s detector has an issue where the data is gain shifted in a nonlinear fashion. Code to correct for this gain shifting was converted from MATLAB to Python as part of a larger effort to convert the full radon emanation analysis chain to Python. The gain correction code takes in the gain shifted data and then aligns it along a single user-defined value. When this happens, there is some aliasing that occurs in the data that also needs correction. The data is then plotted along with three regions of energy corresponding to three specific Polonium isotopes.

Future work will involve analyzing the background for the radon emanation system. Currently, due to statistical uncertainty, the overall background for the system and its time dependency cannot be extrapolated from a single background run. However, co-adding multiple background runs together provides sufficient statistics. The co-added data will be analyzed to find the main background for the system.