Speaker
Description
The Cryogenic Underground Test Facility (CUTE) is operational at SNOLAB. It is currently testing cryogenic silicon and germanium detectors which will be deployed in the SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment. Given the small interaction rate of possible dark matter particles with ordinary matter, the radioactive backgrounds due to the lab cavern and other materials surrounding and part of the CUTE facility must be carefully characterized. One of the main tools for background studies is extensive simulation work using the Geant4 toolkit.
Over the summer term, I focused on implementing a strategy to speed up the background simulations. The innovation of the project relies on the creation and propagation of decay products from the environment and shielding through the CUTE facility, down to a closed surface encompassing the detectors. At this surface, a flux counter records the flux of incoming particles per source component and contaminant. In the next simulation stage, the particle fluxes are propagated onto the detector stack. While this latter simulation stage will be repeated whenever the detector payload is changed, the previous simulations will be done once and reused many times. This presentation outlines an initial version of the simulation pipeline, as well as some preliminary results that can be used to estimate the biases introduced by this approach.
