Speaker
Description
The SNOLAB laboratory is located deep underground in the Canadian Shield and hosts several science experiments which require extremely low levels of background radiation. The deep underground facilities provide significant rock overburden and thus a reduction in the cosmic ray flux and cosmic ray-spallation induced products, such as neutrons. Nevertheless, even when an experiment is deep underground, there are still backgrounds present at levels which can hinder experimental searches for neutrino interactions or the search for dark matter. These backgrounds can include high-energy cosmic ray muons which pass through the rock overburden that then interact with the experiment or rock nearby the experiment, and the detector environment itself, which can include the radioactivity naturally emitted from the surrounding rock and the materials used to construct the experiment. Since many of these backgrounds may be present in the underground environment and the experimental materials themselves, it is highly desirable to measure these backgrounds and to determine the effort required to reduce them further to meet the desired scientific goals of the experiments. This presentation will describe SNOLAB's low-background material screening facilities and background measurement capabilities which can be used to directly measure these radioactive backgrounds and to search for new low-background materials which can be used for future detector fabrication.
| Keyword-1 | Radioactivity |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | Low Backgrounds |
| Keyword-3 | Gerrmanium Detectors |