We have developed an experiment to measure the spectrum of recoil velocities of 37Cl ions due to emission of an energetic neutrino (v) following the electron capture (EC) decay of a sub-monolayer of 37Ar adsorbed on a cold surface. The substrate can be tailored to have novel configurations such as having an underlayer or overlayer of an active 37Ar surrounded by suitable atoms or molecules such as described in Fig.3. Basic principle of the experiment is shown in Fig.1. Schematic of the system is shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 1. Basic reaction: Electron capture decay of 37Ar leads to production of slow (~10eV) 37Cl ions and energetic neutrinos (v's). Example shows a sub-monolayer of 37Ar adsorbed under two monolayers of 40Ar.
Our facility:
 |  |
|---|---|
| Vacuum System | Gas System |
Figure 2: A schematic illustration of the experimental setup used in the recoil measurements. PSD stands for position sensitive detector, MCP stands for microchannel plate.
Our comprehensive data acquisition program, developed by Dr. M.M. Hindi, collects simultaneously a multitude of complementary information such as electron-ion, x ray-ion, electron-electron, and x ray-electron coincidence spectroscopies to be analyzed retrospectively following the data acquisition.