Background Model for the Majorana Demonstrator
Abstract
The Majorana Collaboration is constructing a system containing 40 kg of HPGe detectors to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of a future tonne-scale experiment capable of probing the neutrino mass scale in the inverted-hierarchy region. To realize this, a major goal of the Majorana Demonstrator is to demonstrate a path forward to achieving a background rate at or below 1 cnt/(ROI-t-y) in the 4 keV region of interest around the Q-value at 2039 keV. This goal is pursued through a combination of a significant reduction of radioactive impurities in construction materials with analytical methods for background rejection, for example using powerful pulse shape analysis techniques profiting from the p-type point contact HPGe detectors technology. The effectiveness of these methods is assessed using simulations of the different background components whose purity levels are constrained from radioassay measurements.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1405.1370,
title = {Background Model for the Majorana Demonstrator},
author = {C. Cuesta and N. Abgrall and E. Aguayo and F. T. Avignone and A. S. Barabash and F. E. Bertrand and M. Boswell and V. Brudanin and M. Busch and D. Byram and A. S. Caldwell and Y-D. Chan and C. D. Christofferson and D. C. Combs and C. Cuesta and J. A. Detwiler and P. J. Doe and Yu. Efremenko and V. Egorov and H. Ejiri and S. R. Elliott and J. E. Fast and P. Finnerty and F. M. Fraenkle and A. Galindo-Uribarri and G. K. Giovanetti and J. Goett and M. P. Green and J. Gruszko and V. E. Guiseppe and K. Gusev and A. L. Hallin and R. Hazama and A. Hegai and R. Henning and E. W. Hoppe and S. Howard and M. A. Howe and K. J. Keeter and M. F. Kidd and O. Kochetov and S. I. Konovalov and R. T. Kouzes and B. D. LaFerriere and J. Leon and L. E. Leviner and J. C. Loach and J. MacMullin and S. MacMullin and R. D. Martin and S. Meijer and S. Mertens and M. Nomachi and J. L. Orrell and C. O'Shaughnessy and N. R. Overman and D. G. Phillips and A. W. P. Poon and K. Pushkin and D. C. Radford and J. Rager and K. Rielage and R. G. H. Robertson and E. Romero-Romero and M. C. Ronquest and A. G. Schubert and B. Shanks and T. Shima and M. Shirchenko and K. J. Snavely and N. Snyder and A. M. Suriano and J. Thompson and V. Timkin and W. Tornow and J. E. Trimble and R. L. Varner and S. Vasilyev and K. Vetter and K. Vorren and B. R. White and J. F. Wilkerson and C. Wiseman and W. Xu and E. Yakushev and A. R. Young and C. H. Yu and V. Yumatov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.1370},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
To appear in the Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics, TAUP 2013 (F. Avignone & W. Haxton, editors, Physics Procedia, Elsevier)