München 2009 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 104: Niederenergie-Neutrinophysik & Suche nach dunkler Materie 5

T 104.3: Vortrag

Freitag, 13. März 2009, 14:35–14:50, A140

Tagging of Cosmogenic Radionuclides and Muon-induced Neutrons in the solar Neutrino Experiment BOREXINO — •Quirin Meindl for the BOREXINO-Collaboration — Technische Universität München

The BOREXINO experiment is a 300t liquid-scintillator detector designed for the real-time detection of solar neutrinos in the sub-MeV energy range. Effort is currently directed to the determination of the solar neutrino fluxes from the pep fusion process, the three neutrino emissions of the CNO cycle as well as the low energy part of the ⁸B branch. However, the detection of these neutrino branches is affected by radionuclides induced by the atmospheric muon flux at the site of the experiment. These muon-induced radionuclides form the so-called cosmogenic background. The production of cosmogenic radionuclides is accompanied by the coincidence of atmospheric muons and the neutrons they knock out from ¹²C. This Three-Fold-Coincidence (TFC) of parent muon, knock-off neutron and generated radionuclide is the only known method to reject this cosmogenic background within the data. A high efficiency in the detection of these muons and their knock-off neutrons is therefore crucial for a successful measurement of the pep and CNO neutrino signal. The Talk will give an overview of the TFC technique and the current status of the BOREXINO detection capability of muon-induced neutrons.

This work is supported by funds of the Maier-Leibnitz-Laboratorium (Munich), and the excellence cluster "Universe".