Ryan Martin assembles a detector unit in the glove box of the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR assembly room. Inset is the low-mass front-end board with electronics mounted on a copper leaf spring.
On Dec. 6, working nearly a mile underground in the cleanest space in South Dakota, Ryan Martin of Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division (NSD) assembled the first of 70 detector units for the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR experiment. Each unit consists of a polished slice of pure germanium crystal the size of a hockey puck, attached to an electronics board on a wafer-thin disk of fused silica. MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR , now under construction in the ultraclean facilities of the Davis Campus on the 4,850-foot level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab), will look for the as-yet-unseen phenomenon of neutrinoless double-beta decay. The current executive committee chair of the MAJORANA Collaboration, comprised of more than 100 researchers from the U.S. Canada, Russia, and Japan, is Berkeley Lab's Alan Poon. Martin took about two and a half hours to assemble the first detector. Although he'd practiced the task many times back at the Lab, he'd never assembled a detector unit while wearing four pairs of protective gloves.
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