The design task of creating an efficient radiation shield for the new COBRA double-beta decay experiment led to a comprehensive study of commercially available shielding materials. The aim was to find the most efficient combination of materials under the constraints of an extreme low-background experiment operating in a typical underground laboratory. All existing shield configurations for this type of experiment have been found to perform sub-optimally in comparison to the class of multilayered configurations proposed in this study. The method used here to create a specific shield configuration should yield a close to optimal result when applied to any experiment utilising a radiation shield. In particular, the survey of single material response to a given radiation source turns out to give a guideline for the construction of efficient multilayer shields.
@article{arxiv.nucl-ex/0607032,
title = {Radiation shielding for underground low-background experiments},
author = {D. Y Stewart and P. F. Harrison and B. Morgan and Y. A. Ramachers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:nucl-ex/0607032},
year = {2010}
}