Neutron-induced nuclear recoil background in the PandaX-4T experiment

Abstract

Neutron-induced nuclear recoil background is critical to the dark matter searches in the PandaX-4T liquid xenon experiment. This paper studies the feature of neutron background in liquid xenon and evaluates their contribution in the single scattering nuclear recoil events through three methods. The first method is fully Monte Carlo simulation based. The last two are data-driven methods that also use the multiple scattering signals and high energy signals in the data, respectively. In the PandaX-4T commissioning data with an exposure of 0.63 tonne-year, all these methods give a consistent result that there are $1.15\pm 0.57$ neutron-induced background in dark matter signal region within an approximated nuclear recoil energy window between 5 and 100 keV.

14 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables

References in corpus (7)

• Dark Matter Search Results from the PandaX-4T Commissioning Run
• Current status of direct dark matter detection experiments
• XENON1T Dark Matter Data Analysis: Signal & Background Models, and Statistical Inference
• Low-energy (0.7-74 keV) nuclear recoil calibration of the LUX dark matter experiment using D-D neutron scattering kinematics
• Low Radioactive Material Screening and Background Control for the PandaX-4T Experiment
• Neutron production in (alpha, n) reactions
• Low Background Stainless Steel for the Pressure Vessel in the PandaX-II Dark Matter Experiment

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Dark Matter Search Results from 1.54 Tonne$\cdot$Year Exposure of PandaX-4T
• Constraints on the axial-vector and pseudo-scalar mediated WIMP-nucleus interactions from PandaX-4T experiment
• Search for light dark matter from atmosphere in PandaX-4T