2022 CAP Congress / Congrès de l'ACP 2022

(U*) (POS-40) Cosmogenic Muon Background Characterization for nEXO

7 Jun 2022, 17:56

2m

MUSC Marketplace (McMaster University)

Poster Competition (Undergraduate Student) / Compétition affiches (Étudiant(e) du 1er cycle) Particle Physics / Physique des particules (PPD) PPD Poster Session & Student Poster Competition (21) | Session d'affiches PPD et concours d'affiches étudiantes (21)

Speaker

Regan Ross

Description

The nEXO experiment is being designed to search for neutrino-less double beta decay ($0\nu \beta \beta$) in a 5000 kg liquid xenon time projection chamber (TPC) enriched to the isotope xenon-136. nEXO's > 10${}^{28}$ year sensitivity reach to the $0\nu \beta \beta$ half-life requires extremely low backgrounds from external sources. Backgrounds are dealt with in part by surrounding the TPC with an outer detector (OD) in the form of a cylindrical water tank. The OD serves both to shield from incident particles like gamma and neutron radiation, as well as to veto cosmogenic backgrounds by detecting the Cherenkov light of passing muons using photomultiplier tubes (PMTs).

In this talk, we discuss the simulation of incident cosmic muons and their respective event characterization. We examine the interrelatedness of muon path lengths, muon impact parameters, PMT geometries and the comparative detection efficiencies for the incident particles.

Presentation materials

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