Vision Document (March 2013)

The Vision Document linked above was requested by Michael Salamon during the Cosmic Frontier Workshop at SLAC. It presents the reasons we believe such a consortium or network is needed for rare event searches. It also sets out certain “Principles” which represent the consensus of members of the community who contributed to the discussion during the AARM, DURA, and Facilities Frontier targeted meetings. It does NOT explain how such a consortium will be run in practice, nor how much it would cost, nor how to organize the disparate groups. The purpose of this WIKI is to begin the hard work of creating the form of such an entity, eventually to be proposed from the community to DOE and NSF.

• Slides shown by John Orrell part of the Discussion of Principles
• Low Background Assay Slides shown at the DURA meeting by Prisca - includes introduction to the Consortium concept.
• European Network Slides shown at the LRT 2013 conference by M. Laubenstein (highlights community need, albeit in Europe)
• National User Facility Organization has a list of user facilities which we might look at for models.
• Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research is an example of a cross-laboratory consortium with a Science Board structure

• How centralized?
• Composition of Scientific board?
• Term limits, representation, international members.
• Led by National lab or by University?
• Agency reporting? How do they measure effectiveness? What's the specific relationship between the agencies and the Consortium?

• Estimate number of FTE needed to run existing screeners and percent of screener time available to users
• Estimate M&S and other infrastructure
• Sample prep and shipping costs

• choose several models and cost them
• IT support (website, screening scheduling tools, universal database, listserv)
• Postdoc & student support
• Senior personnel
• Travel for collab meetings, etc

• Determine model for subsidy assignment
• Determine a user fee

• No one has to put new screeners and R&D in their proposals - just user fees
• Cost of maintaining screeners through other funding sources
• Efficient use of existing screeners thru universal scheduling
• Dedicated personnel which maintain the knowledge base, no retraining (except students)

• Operating Fund is provided by DOE as to a National Lab (LDRD funds) and the Consortium responds to proposals on how to use it?
• Consortium requests proposals and selects best ones to put forward to DOE/NSF as a proposal from the Consortium?
• How do we include new consortium members, thus adding screeners.

Include type, percent available, sensitivity, and the FTE technicians & cost for user screening of available resources.

• PNNL (Eric Hoppe)
  • ICP-MS - Dedicated instrument and clean room facilities for low background assays
    • Variety of materials can be assayed such as polymers, electronic components, cables and wires, metals, etc. to sub-micro Bq
  • Gamma-ray assay - Above and below ground, single and multi-xtal array HPGe detectors with radon purge
    • Above ground include 6 commercially shielded HPGe detectors (n-type and p-type), ranging from 40-75%
    • Below ground systems under development in new shallow underground lab.
  • NAA - PNNL works with WSU, OSU, and others to perform NAA when needed.
  • Materials - Production and/or preparation and handling
    • Electroformed copper produced in clean room environment in an on-site shallow underground laboratory.
    • Surface preparation, cleaning, packaging, and handling of various materials for low-background detectors.
  • Variety of other instrument capabilities for assay purposes available through the EMSL
    • http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/capabilities/
• Soudan (Prisca Cushman)
  • Low threshold Gopher HPGe (managed by CDMS)
    • Cost is minimal - samples changed by staff and analysis done by CDMS grad student, limited availability
  • SOLO HPGe (managed by Brown/LUX)
    • No availability at the moment
  • Muon Shielded Room with time-stamped muon tracks
    • Plenty of room under the shield and easy access to time stamp electronics to correlate with tracks.
  • Neutron Multiplicity Meter and USD LS neutron detector
• SURF (Jason Goon)
  • CUBED HPGe low background counter at the 4850-ft level
  • Begin to accept samples in July of 2013
• KURF (Reyco Henning)
  • 2 low background commercial HPGe detectors with Rn purge installed (See Nucl. Instr. and Methods A 642 (2011) 65)
  • Technical support provided by TUNL and a part-time graduate student.
  • Samples currently screened at no cost to experiments, however increased demand may change this.
• LBNL (incl Oroville) (Yuen-dat Chen)
• UC Davis (Mani Tripathi)
  • NAA using TRIGA reactors at Davis (2MW) and Irvine (0.5MW). Davis reactor allows for quick exposures in the reactor core or longer exposures at the periphery of the water tank. At the Irvine reactor we are deploying a heavy water shielded sample-holder module. This will provide x10 improvement in the thermal/fast neutron flux ratio.
  • IC-PMS This facility is owned by another group on campus. We are able to use it on a recharge basis.
  • Radon Screening A facility is being developed for use by the LZ collaboration. Not clear at this point whether there will be time available for other users.

• NAA (Alabama) (Andreas Piepke)

• Creation of a centrally-managed website with all screeners and availability listed
• How do we prioritize requests?
• Model for contacting available screener and submitting a request: Let each center define their access model.
  • PNNL
  • Soudan
  • SURF
  • KURF. Contact Reyco Henning via email (rhenning@unc.edu). The throughput is low enough that this model should work.
  • LBNL (incl Oroville)
  • NAA (UC Davis)
  • NAA (Alabama)

• All data taken with subsidized screeners is immediately entered into database
• Data on proprietary screeners will negotiate when their data will become public.
• Do we want to allow for some sensitive screening which is NOT public, but then they pay more for a non-disclosure agreement?
• Policies for papers which use this data?