Freiburg 2008 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 86: Niederenergie-Neutrinophysik und Suche nach Dunkler Materie I

T 86.4: Talk

Monday, March 3, 2008, 17:35–17:50, KGII-HS 2004

CDMS-II Backgrounds — •Tobias Bruch for the CDMS collaboration — University of Zurich, Switzerland

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment (CDMS-II) searches for non-luminos, non-baryonic Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), that could form the majority of the matter in the Universe. The CDMS-II experiment operates Ge and Si detectors at cryogenic temperatures, to detect WIMPs via their elastic scattering off nuclei. The kinetic energy imparted to a nucleus in an elastic WIMP-nucleon scatter would range from a few keV to tens of keV. The small recoil energy coupled to an expected low event rate, requires an effective background suppression. Active and passive shielding are used to reduce backgrounds produced outside of the experimental apparatus, leaving decays of radioactive contaminations inside the shielding as the dominant natural radioactivity background. We will present a background model based on new Monte Carlo simulations, which can explain the observed background spectra in the CDMS detectors.