Related papers: Low energy neutron background in deep underground …
Naturally occurring background radiation is a source of correlated decoherence events in superconducting qubits that will challenge error-correction schemes. To characterize the radiation environment in an unshielded laboratory, we…
In the last few years many detector technologies for thermal neutron detection have been developed in order to face the shortage of 3He, which is now much less available and more expensive. Moreover the 3He-based detectors can not fulfil…
One of the important features of nuclear forces is their strong repulsive nature at short ($\le 0.5-0.6$~Fm) distances which prevents atomic nuclei from collapsing, thus guarantying the stability for the visible matter. However the…
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) is capable of measuring simultaneously the flux of electron-type neutrinos and the total flux of all active flavours of neutrinos originating from the Sun. A model-independent test of neutrino flavour…
The neutron background at the underground laboratory at Boulby - a site for several dark matter experiments - is discussed. Special emphasis is put on the neutron background produced by cosmic-ray muons. The most recent versions of the muon…
The neutron capture is a process that concerns most of the nuclei used to build our detectors. This process produces protons, alpha particles, and gamma rays which generate background signals. Characterizing this background is important for…
DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) is a proposed long-baseline neutrino experiment in the US with a baseline of 1300 km from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) to Sanford Underground Research Facility, which will…
Third-generation dark matter detectors will be fully sensitive to the boron-8 solar neutrino flux. Because of this, the characterization of such a background has been the subject of extensive analyses over the last few years. In contrast,…
Deflections in the propagation of charged ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) caused by magnetic fields make the identification of their sources challenging. On the other hand, the arrival directions at Earth of neutrons point directly…
In the double beta decay experiment NEMO~3 a precise knowledge of the background in the signal region is of outstanding importance. This article presents the methods used in NEMO~3 to evaluate the backgrounds resulting from most if not all…
We explore the implications of the existence of heavy neutral fermions (i.e., sterile neutrinos) for the thermal history of the early universe. In particular, we consider sterile neutrinos with rest masses in the 100 MeV to 500 MeV range,…
In this paper we examine the puzzle of neutron formation in atmospheric discharge. While conventional explanation relies on photonuclear reactions, voltages used to recreate such discharges in the lab (1 MV) are thought to be not high…
Supernovae are rare nearby, but they are not rare in the Universe, and all past core-collapse supernovae contributed to the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB), for which the near-term detection prospects are very good. The…
SNOLAB is one of the deepest underground laboratories in the world with an overburden of 2092 m. The SNO+ detector is designed to achieve several fundamental physics goals as a low-background experiment, particularly measuring the Earth's…
Muon-induced neutrons constitute a prominent background component in a number of low count rate experiments, namely direct searches for Dark Matter. In this work we describe a neutron detector to measure this background in an underground…
We have developed a neutrino detector with threshold energies from ~0.115 to 105 MeV in a clean detection mode almost completely void of accidental backgrounds. It was initially developed for the NASA $\nu$SOL project to put a solar…
CONUS+ is an experiment aiming at detecting coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS) of reactor antineutrinos on germanium nuclei in the fully coherent regime, continuing the CONUS physics program conducted at the Brokdorf…
We report a novel neutron-detection approach employing an EJ-309 liquid scintillator surrounded by six 3He proportional counters. Tests were performed at the FRANZ facility of the Goethe-University Frankfurt using the 7Li(p,n0)7Be reaction,…
CONUS is a novel experiment aiming at detecting elastic neutrino nucleus scattering in the fully coherent regime using high-purity Germanium (Ge) detectors and a reactor as antineutrino ($\bar\nu$) source. The detector setup is installed at…
We demonstrate that current and planned underground neutrino experiments could offer a powerful probe of few-MeV dark matter when combined with a nearby high-intensity low-to-medium energy electron accelerator. This experimental setup, an…