Speaker
Description
The talk is a summary of the characterisation work done for the understanding, calibration and then commissioning of the EJ-309 organic liquid scintillators used by the ERC funded SHADES project lead by prof. Best. A new nuclear astrophysics experiment aiming to perform, for the first time, a direct cross section measurements for the 22Ne(α,n)25Mg reaction at very low energy. The SHADES experiment will be held in the deep-underground INFN’s facility of LGNS (Gran Sasso – AQ). This will help to minimize the background activity by several orders of magnitude, and therefore, make the collected data of a much higher quality.
SHADES uses a hybrid detection system that consists of a first circular row of organic liquid scintillators surrounded 02 other rows of 3He counters. The ingenuity of this system lies in the double role of the scintillators: firstly, as a moderating material, thermalizing high energy neutrons that can’t be detected by the 3He counters and secondly, the data provided by counters can be time-matched with the one of the liquid scintillators to effectively filtrate “bad” events that can’t be emanating from the studied reaction. Moreover, steel-made 3He counters have a lower intrinsic radioactivity, which helps to further push the detection precision.
