PDRA support for the Boulby ICP-MS

The Boulby Underground Science Laboratory is the UK's flagship centre for deep underground research. One of its key capabilities, supporting many scientific activities including the direct search for dark matter and neutrino less double beta decay, is radiochemical assay. To boost this capability further, an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS) is currently being installed in the Boulby surface building. This new capability will provide rapid, ultra-high-sensitivity determination of trace impurities, notably the primordial radioisotopes 238U and 232Th. This significantly increases sampling throughput at Boulby mine, but more importantly, provides complementary data from which more complete understanding of radioactive backgrounds may be determined. The events detected from these radioisotopes present a background to the signals being searched for, at a level which is known to present a major challenge facing the next generation of particle physics experiments. The new capability will also offer important new opportunities for commercialisation. This is a joint initiative with the University of Edinburgh who have agreed to provide matching support.