Speaker
Description
The DEAP-3600 experiment is a direct dark matter (DM) search located 2 km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Canada, employing a spherical acrylic vessel capable of holding 3600 kg of liquid Argon (LAr) target surrounded by a water Cherenkov veto system. The inner vessel and the water tank are monitored by photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) to detect scintillation and Cherenkov light. Despite the large rock overburden, high energy cosmic ray muons produced in the atmosphere penetrate the detector depth and constitute an important background through direct detection and the production of cosmogenic neutrons in the surrounding rocks, which can mimic dark matter signals. In this work, we study the flux of cosmic ray muons at the DEAP-3600 site using events in the water tank along with the muons which are in coincidence with the water tank and inner LAr detector. The water tank PMTs detect the Cherenkov light produced due to through-going muons, whereas coincident muon signals are used in background discrimination for the dark matter search. The precise study of muon-induced backgrounds is essential in understanding and rejecting backgrounds in the DEAP-3600 dark matter search. These results provide an important benchmark for the future rare-event search experiments at the SNOLAB facility.
| Keyword-1 | Dark matter, cosmic ray muons |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | DEAP-3600, SNOLAB |