A Highly Efficient Neutron Veto for Dark Matter Experiments

Abstract

We present a conceptual design for an active neutron veto, based on boron-loaded liquid scintillator, for use in direct-detection dark matter experiments. The simulated efficiency of a 1 meter thick veto, after including the effects of neutron captures in the inner detector and inefficiencies due to feed-throughs into the veto, is greater than 99.5% for background events produced by radiogenic neutrons, while the background due to externally produced cosmogenic neutrons is reduced by more than 95%. The ability of the veto to both significantly suppress, and provide in situ measurements of, these two dominant sources of background would make the next generation of dark matter experiments much more robust, and dramatically improve the credibility of a dark matter detection claim based on the observation of a few recoil events. The veto would also allow direct extrapolation between the background-free operation of a small detector and the physics reach of a larger detector of similar construction.

25 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Search for neutrino oscillations on a long base-line at the CHOOZ nuclear power station
• First Dark Matter Results from the XENON100 Experiment
• New results on solar neutrino fluxes from 192 days of Borexino data
• Muon-Induced Background Study for Underground Laboratories
• Search for Neutrino Oscillations at the Palo Verde Nuclear Reactors
• Measurements of extremely low radioactivity levels in BOREXINO
• Validation of spallation neutron production and propagation within Geant4
• The ZEPLIN-III Anti-Coincidence Veto Detector

Cited by in corpus (18)

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• First Results from the DarkSide-50 Dark Matter Experiment at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
• Results from the first use of low radioactivity argon in a dark matter search
• Direct dark matter detection: the next decade
• Light Yield in DarkSide-10: a Prototype Two-phase Liquid Argon TPC for Dark Matter Searches
• Neutron production induced by $\alpha$-decay with Geant4
• Quenching Factor for Low Energy Nuclear Recoils in a Plastic Scintillator
• Performance of a prototype active veto system using liquid scintillator for a dark matter search experiment
• Novel Opaque Scintillator for Neutrino Detection
• A. Fluka Study of Underground Cosmogenic Neutron Production
• Input Comparison of Radiogenic Neutron Estimates for Ultra-low Background Experiments
• The Electronics and Data Acquisition System for the DarkSide-50 Veto Detectors
• Invited Article: miniTimeCube
• Quenching Measurements and Modeling of a Boron-Loaded Organic Liquid Scintillator
• A Prototype Neutron Veto for Dark Matter Detectors
• Design of a mobile neutron spectrometer for the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS)
• Prototyping an Active Neutron Veto for SuperCDMS
• DarkSide50 results from first argon run