Cosmogenic Activation of Materials Used in Rare Event Search Experiments

Abstract

We evaluate the cosmogenic production rates in some materials that are commonly used as targets and shielding/supporting components for detecting rare events. The results from Geant4 simulations are compared with the calculations of ACTIVIA and the available experimental data. We demonstrate that the production rates from the Geant4-based simulations agree with the available data reasonably well. As a result, we report that the cosmogenic production of several isotopes in various materials can generate potential backgrounds for direct detection of dark matter and neutrinoless double-beta decay.

20 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Dark Matter Candidates from Particle Physics and Methods of Detection
• Dark Matter Results from 225 Live Days of XENON100 Data
• Limit on Neutrinoless ββ Decay of Xe-136 from the First Phase of KamLAND-Zen and Comparison with the Positive Claim in Ge-76
• Probing New Physics Models of Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay with SuperNEMO
• Search for Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay of ${}^{130}$Te with CUORE-0
• Radiogenic and Muon-Induced Backgrounds in the LUX Dark Matter Detector
• ACTIVIA: Calculation of Isotope Production Cross-sections and Yields
• Search for Event Rate Modulation in XENON100 Electronic Recoil Data
• The Sanford Underground Research Facility at Homestake
• Production and relevance of cosmogenic radionuclides in NaI(Tl) crystals

Cited by in corpus (27)

• Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay: Status and Prospects
• Excess Electronic Recoil Events in XENON1T
• Projected WIMP sensitivity of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment
• Theia: An advanced optical neutrino detector
• Low background techniques in bolometers for double-beta decay search
• Cosmogenic production of tritium in dark matter detectors
• Identification of Radiopure Titanium for the LZ Dark Matter Experiment and Future Rare Event Searches
• Cosmogenic activation of materials
• Background assessment for the TREX Dark Matter experiment
• Geant4-based electromagnetic background model for the CRESST dark matter experiment
• Cosmogenic activation of silicon
• Large-size sub-keV sensitive germanium detectors for the CONUS experiment
• Cosmogenic Activation of Germanium Used for Tonne-Scale Rare Event Search Experiments
• XENON1T Excess: Some Possible Backgrounds
• Production Rate Measurement of Tritium and Other Cosmogenic Isotopes in Germanium with CDMSlite
• Cosmogenic activation in double beta decay experiments
• GeMSE: a Low-Background Facility for Gamma-Spectrometry at Moderate Rock Overburden
• Naturally occurring ${}^{32}$Si and low-background silicon dark matter detectors
• Study of cosmogenic activation above ground for the DarkSide-20k experiment
• Cosmic muon flux attenuation methods for superconducting qubit experiments
• Cosmogenic activation of sodium iodide
• Cosmogenic background study for a 100Mo-based bolometric demonstration experiment at China JinPing underground Laboratory
• Radioactive background for ProtoDUNE detector
• Sensitivity of the DARWIN observatory to the neutrinoless double beta decay of ${}^{136}$Xe
• Muon Track Reconstruction in a Segmented Bolometric Array Using Multi-Objective Optimization
• Study on cosmogenic activation in copper for rare event search experiments
• Monte Carlo Characterization of the Cosmic Ray Muon Flux in Subsurface Geological Repositories