An important background in detectors using liquid xenon for rare event searches arises from the decays of radon and its daughters. We report for the first time a reduction of ²²² Rn in the gas phase above a liquid xenon reservoir. We show a reduction factor of 4 for the ²²² Rn concentration in boil-off xenon gas compared to the radon enriched liquid phase. A semiconductor-based α -detector and miniaturized proportional counters are used to detect the radon. As the radon depletion in the boil-off gas is understood as a single-stage distillation process, this result establishes the suitability of cryogenic distillation to separate radon from xenon down to the 10⁻¹⁵ mol/mol level.
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Bruenner et al. (2017) studied this question.
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