Conveners
Cosmogenic Backgrounds & Material Activation
- Vitaly Kudryavtsev (University of Sheffield)
Cosmogenic Backgrounds & Material Activation
- Vitaly Kudryavtsev (University of Sheffield)
In experiments devoted to investigate rare events, demanding ultra-low background conditions, radioisotopes produced by the exposure of materials to cosmic rays mainly on the Earth’s surface can become problematic to achieve the required sensitivity. The origin of this cosmogenic activation will be presented and the ways to quantify the activation yields following different approaches will be...
Long-lived radioactive isotopes produced by cosmogenic activation are a major source of background for rare event searches such as dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay. Understanding the production rates of these cosmogenic isotopes is extremely important for calculating accurate radioactive background models and for determining the total allowable surface residence time of detector...
The SuperCDMS experiment, which is under installation at SNOLAB, will use Ge and Si detectors to search for low-mass dark matter interactions. In the corresponding energy regime of interest, tritium produced by the cosmogenic activation of the detectors is expected to produce significant backgrounds. In this talk, I will discuss the exposure history of these detectors, as well as...
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment is a dual-phase liquid-gas 10-tonne xenon time projection chamber (TPC) seeking to discover WIMP dark matter particles or set limits on their properties. The detector has been built at the SURF underground laboratory in South Dakota, USA, and first data set world leading limits on WIMP cross sections. To have the necessary sensitivity, the backgrounds in the...
Most of us are familiar with radiopurity.org, which provides a simple, public interface to radioactivity assay results for hundreds of materials from measurements performed around the world. Background Explorer is a tool designed to simplify the common tasks in modeling backgrounds by associating assay measurements with databases of components and radiation transport simulation results through...
