Criotec Impianti SpA Press Release

News > Announcements | October 10th, 2023

Criotec Impianti SpA was recently awarded the contract with CERN for the design, manufacturing, and installation of the cryogenic system for the Neutrino Platform Dark Side 20k proximity cryogenics.

The DarkSide-20k experiment consists of an inner detector housed within a sealed stainless steel vessel and an outer muon veto all deployed within a ProtoDUNE-style membrane cryostat. It is currently under construction in the Hall-C of Gran Sasso National Laboratory, the largest underground laboratory in the world devoted to neutrino and astroparticle physics sited in Italy, and is foreseen to begin operations in 2026 and will either detect Weak Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter or exclude a large fraction of favored WIMP parameter space.

The scope of the contract include the design, manufacturing and installation of eight cryogenic valve boxes and one warm valve box, each equipped for a specific function (argon purification, argon condensing, argon phase separation, radon trap and argon/nitrogen distribution), and sixteen cryogenic vacuum super- insulated transfer lines distributing liquid and gas argon and liquid and gas nitrogen between cryogenic storage vessels, the valve boxes, and the liquid argon cryostat for a total length of more than 200 m.

This contract has a duration of 12 months and joins other projects awarded by Criotec Impianti SpA for the supply of cryogenic equipment for CERN and LNGS experiments.