Due to their distinct and tailorable internal cavity structures, zeolites serve as promising materials for efficient and specific gas separations such as the separation of /CO2 from N2. A subset of ...zeolite materials exhibits trapdoor behavior which can be exploited for particularly challenging separations, such as the separation of hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium for the nuclear industry. This study systematically delves into the influence of the chabazite (CHA) and merlinoite (MER) zeolite frameworks combined with different door-keeping cations (K + , Rb + , and Cs + ) on the trapdoor separation behavior under a variety of thermal and gas conditions. Both CHA and MER frameworks were synthesized from the same parent Y-zeolite and studied using in situ X-ray diffraction as a function of increasing temperatures under 1 bar H 2 exposures. This resulted in distinct thermal responses, with merlinoite zeolites exhibiting expansion and chabazite zeolites showing contraction of the crystal structure. Simultaneous thermal analysis (STA) and gas sorption techniques further demonstrated how the size of trapdoor cations restricts access to the internal porosities of the zeolite frameworks. These findings highlight that both the zeolite frameworks and the associated trapdoor cations dictate the thermal response and gas sorption behavior. Frameworks determine the crystalline geometry, the maximum porosities, and displacement of the cation in gas sorption, while associated cations directly affect the blockage of the functional sites and the thermal behavior of the frameworks. This work contributes new insights into the efficient design of zeolites for gas separation applications and highlights the significant role of the trapdoor mechanism.
This paper describes the design, fabrication, commissioning and use of a CALibration source Insertion System (CALIS) in the DarkSide-50 direct dark matter search experiment. CALIS deploys radioactive ...sources into the liquid scintillator veto to characterize the detector response and detection efficiency of the DarkSide-50 Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber, and the surrounding 30 t organic liquid scintillator neutron veto. It was commissioned in September 2014 and has been used successfully in several gamma and neutron source campaigns since then. A description of the hardware and an excerpt of calibration analysis results are given below.
We report on searches for neutrinos and antineutrinos from astrophysical sources performed with the Borexino detector at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. Electron antineutrinos (ν¯e) ...are detected in an organic liquid scintillator through the inverse β-decay reaction. In the present work we set model-independent upper limits in the energy range 1.8–16.8 MeV on neutrino fluxes from unknown sources that improve our previous results, on average, by a factor 2.5. Using the same data set, we first obtain experimental constraints on the diffuse supernova ν¯e fluxes in the previously unexplored region below 8 MeV. A search for ν¯e in the solar neutrino flux is also presented: the presence of ν¯e would be a manifestation of a non-zero anomalous magnetic moment of the neutrino, making possible its conversion to antineutrinos in the strong magnetic field of the Sun. We obtain a limit for a solar ν¯e flux of 384 cm–2 s–1 (90% C.L.), assuming an undistorted solar 8B neutrinos energy spectrum, that corresponds to a transition probability pνe→ν¯e< 7.2 × 10–5 (90% C.L.) for Eν¯e > 1.8 MeV. At lower energies, by investigating the spectral shape of elastic scattering events, we obtain a new limit on solar 7Be-νe conversion into ν¯e of pνe→ν¯e< 0.14 (90% C.L.) at 0.862 MeV. Last, we investigate solar flares as possible neutrino sources and obtain the strongest up-to-date limits on the fluence of neutrinos of all flavor neutrino below 3–7 MeV. Assuming the neutrino flux to be proportional to the flare’s intensity, we exclude an intense solar flare as the cause of the observed excess of events in run 117 of the Cl-Ar Homestake experiment.
We report the first results of DarkSide-50, a direct search for dark matter operating in the underground Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) and searching for the rare nuclear recoils possibly ...induced by weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The dark matter detector is a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber with a (46.4±0.7) kg active mass, operated inside a 30 t organic liquid scintillator neutron veto, which is in turn installed at the center of a 1 kt water Cherenkov veto for the residual flux of cosmic rays. We report here the null results of a dark matter search for a (1422±67) kgd exposure with an atmospheric argon fill. This is the most sensitive dark matter search performed with an argon target, corresponding to a 90% CL upper limit on the WIMP-nucleon spin-independent cross section of 6.1×10−44 cm2 for a WIMP mass of 100 Gev/c2.
The DarkSide-50 direct-detection dark matter experiment is a dual-phase argon time projection chamber operating at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. This paper reports on the blind analysis of a ...(16,660+-270) kg d exposure using a target of low-radioactivity argon extracted from underground sources. We find no events in the dark matter selection box and set a 90% C.L. upper limit on the dark matter-nucleon spin-independent cross section of 1.14E-44 cm^2 (3.78E-44 cm^2, 3.43E-43 cm^2) for a WIMP mass of 100 GeV/c^2 (1 TeV/c^2, 10 TeV/c^2).
We report the measurement of the longitudinal diffusion constant in liquid argon with the DarkSide-50 dual-phase time projection chamber. The measurement is performed at drift electric fields of 100 ...V/cm, 150 V/cm, and 200 V/cm using high statistics \(^{39}\)Ar decays from atmospheric argon. We derive an expression to describe the pulse shape of the electroluminescence signal (S2) in dual-phase TPCs. The derived S2 pulse shape is fit to events from the uppermost portion of the TPC in order to characterize the radial dependence of the signal. The results are provided as inputs to the measurement of the longitudinal diffusion constant DL, which we find to be (4.12 \(\pm\) 0.04) cm\(^2\)/s for a selection of 140keV electron recoil events in 200V/cm drift field and 2.8kV/cm extraction field. To study the systematics of our measurement we examine datasets of varying event energy, field strength, and detector volume yielding a weighted average value for the diffusion constant of (4.09 \(\pm\) 0.09) cm\(^2\) /s. The measured longitudinal diffusion constant is observed to have an energy dependence, and within the studied energy range the result is systematically lower than other results in the literature.
Encouraged by the success of the first hypernuclear spectroscopy through the
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reaction (JLab E89-009), a new improved experiment with a newly developed High resolution Kaon ...Spectrometer (HKS) and a new configuration of the electron spectrometer is planned at the JLab Hall C. The introduction of the HKS will improve by a factor of two, the energy resolution which was limited by the previous kaon spectrometer. The hypernuclear yield and the signal to noise ratio will be also improved by a factor of 50 and 10, respectively.
The DarkSide-50 experiment at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso is a search for dark matter using a dual phase time projection chamber with 50 kg of low radioactivity argon as target. Light ...signals from interactions in the argon are detected by a system of 38 photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs), 19 above and 19 below the TPC volume inside the argon cryostat. We describe the electronics which processes the signals from the photo-multipliers, the trigger system which identifies events of interest, and the data-acquisition system which records the data for further analysis. The electronics include resistive voltage dividers on the PMTs, custom pre-amplifiers mounted directly on the PMT voltage dividers in the liquid argon, and custom amplifier/discriminators (at room temperature). After amplification, the PMT signals are digitized in CAEN waveform digitizers, and CAEN logic modules are used to construct the trigger, the data acquisition system for the TPC is based on the Fermilab "artdaq" software. The system has been in operation since early 2014.
Measurements were made of scintillation light yield of alpha particles from the \(^{222}\)Rn decay chain within the DarkSide-50 liquid argon time projection chamber. The light yield was found to ...increase as the applied electric field increased, with alphas in a 200 V/cm electric field exhibiting a 2% increase in light yield compared to alphas in no field.
Three undoped di-urea cross-linked poly(oxyethylene) (POE)/siloxane hybrid matrices, classed as di-ureasils, incorporating POE segments with different lengths were prepared through the carboxylic ...acid solvolysis sol–gel method using formic acid. The resulting hybrids were characterized by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform mid-infrared spectroscopy, 29Si and cross-polarization 13C magic-angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance and photoluminescence spectroscopy. The hybrids’ structure is essentially independent of the polymer chain length and the materials are room temperature white-light emitters with emission quantum yields of ∼10±1% and lifetime average values between 2 and 4ns. For the di-ureasil host with short polymer chains the solvolysis method favours the increase of the PL quantum yields relatively to conventional sol–gel route.
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