Xenon Recirculation-Purification with a Heat Exchanger

Understand

Liquid-xenon based particle detectors have been dramatically growing in size during the last years, and are now exceeding the one-ton scale.

• The required high xenon purity is usually achieved by continuous recirculation of xenon gas through a high-temperature getter.
• This challenges the traditional way of cooling these large detectors, since in a thermally well insulated detector, most of the cooling power is spent to compensate losses from recirculation.
• The phase change during recondensing requires five times more cooling power than cooling the gas from ambient temperature to -100C (173 K).