Intrinsic neutron background of nuclear emulsions for directional Dark Matter searches

Abstract

Recent developments of the nuclear emulsion technology led to the production of films with nanometric silver halide grains suitable to track low energy nuclear recoils with submicrometric length. This improvement opens the way to a directional Dark Matter detection, thus providing an innovative and complementary approach to the on-going WIMP searches. An important background source for these searches is represented by neutron-induced nuclear recoils that can mimic the WIMP signal. In this paper we provide an estimation of the contribution to this background from the intrinsic radioactive contamination of nuclear emulsions. We also report the induced background as a function of the read-out threshold, by using a GEANT4 simulation of the nuclear emulsion, showing that it amounts to about 0.06 neutrons per year per kilogram, fully compatible with the design of a 10 kg$\times$year exposure.

Revised version

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• NEWS: Nuclear Emulsions for WIMP Search
• Development of New Tracking Detector with Fine-grained Nuclear Emulsion for sub-MeV Neutron Measurement
• Environmental sub-MeV neutron measurement at the Gran Sasso surface laboratory with a super-fine-grained nuclear emulsion detector
• Supernova neutrino physics with a nuclear emulsion detector