Scintillation Balloon for Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay Search with Liquid Scintillator Detectors

Abstract

Environmental radioactivity is a dominant background for rare decay search experiments, and it is difficult to completely remove such an impurity from detector vessels. We propose a scintillation balloon as the active vessel of a liquid scintillator in order to identify this undesirable radioactivity. According to our feasibility studies, the scintillation balloon enables the bismuth--polonium sequential decay to be tagged with a 99.7\% efficiency, assuming a KamLAND (Kamioka Liquid scintillator AntiNeutrino Detector)-type liquid scintillator detector. This tagging of sequential decay using alpha-ray from the polonium improves the sensitivity to neutrinoless double-beta decay with rejecting beta-ray background from the bismuth.