First observation of two-neutrino double electron capture in $^{124}$Xe with XENON1T · HackerPapers discussions

First observation of two-neutrino double electron capture in $^{124}$Xe with XENON1T — mentioned by lostlogin

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 19:42:48 GMT

I think the volume is even more than that. “XENON1T uses 3.2 t of ultra-pure liquid xenon (LXe), of which 2t are within the sensitive volume of the time projection chamber (TPC)” From the paper linked above. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11002.pdf

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First observation of two-neutrino double electron capture in $^{124}$Xe with XENON1T — mentioned by lisper

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 16:42:44 GMT

Arstechnica has a much better summary: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/dark-matter-detector... But the best source is the original paper, which is quite readable even for a non-expert: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11002.pdf

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First observation of two-neutrino double electron capture in $^{124}$Xe with XENON1T — mentioned by lisper

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 15:00:06 GMT

It's not quite as rare as the article makes it out to be. It's not like they by chance happened to detect a single event that only happens every few trillion years. They had a TON (actually three tons) of xenon. Decay events happened every few days, and they collected over 100 of them. Those events have a particular "signature" that allows them to be distinguished from other kinds of events. Even then, they needed to apply statistical methods to compute the odds that the data they were seeing was real and not from random chance, and the result was that the odds were not quite high enough to…

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First observation of two-neutrino double electron capture in $^{124}$Xe with XENON1T — mentioned by ISL

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 14:35:39 GMT

Here's the arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11002.pdf Look for the discussion of backgrounds.

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