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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 111: Niederenergie-Neutrinophysik/Suche nach Dunkler Materie 6

T 111.7: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 29. Februar 2012, 18:25–18:40, ZHG 103

Investigation of shielding powers of different materials and shielding depths for secondary cosmic rays — •Aaron Michel, Allen Caldwell, Béla Majorovits, and Christopher O’Shaughnessy — Max-Planck-Institut für Physik

Primary cosmic rays generate a considerable flux of secondary particles on Earth’s surface. In low background applications like the Gerda experiment, it is important to shield the detector from all possible sources of radioactivity. As the background from external sources becomes lower, the internal cosmogenically produced background in detectors becomes non-negligable. Detector materials like germanium need to be well shielded to avoid cosmogenic activation. The production of long-lived radioactive isotopes inside detectors will affect their sensitivity. In order to quantify the expected background contribution due to cosmogenic isotopes, a good understanding of the shielding power is needed. A systematic investigation based on Monte-Carlo simulations of the actual interaction of cosmic ray secondaries with the shielding material is presented. The Geant4 package with selected physics libraries is used for the calculation of the cross-sections. The propagation of secondary cosmic ray particles through different shielding materials is simulated. The shielding powers for different depths are shown for different shielding materials.