Mainz 2012 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 40: Astroteilchenphysik

HK 40.6: Talk

Thursday, March 22, 2012, 18:15–18:30, RW 3

MC Benchmarks for GERDA LAr Veto Designs — •Bjoern Lehnert — TU-Dresden

The GERmanium Detector Array (GERDA) experiment is designed to search for neutrinoless beta decay in ⁷⁶Ge and is able to directly test the present claim by parts of the Heidelberg-Moscow Collaboration. The experiment started recently its first physics phase with eight enriched detectors, after a 17 month long commissioning period. GERDA operates an array of HPGe detectors in liquid argon (LAr), which acts both as a shield for external backgrounds and as a cryogenic cooling. Furthermore, LAr has the potential to be instrumented and therefore be used as an active veto for background events through the detection of the produced scintillation light. In this talk, Monte Carlo studies for benchmarking and optimizing different LAr veto designs will be presented. LAr scintillates at 128 nm which, combined with the cryogenic temperature in which the detector is operated and its optical properties, poses many challenges in the design of an efficient veto that would help the experiment to reduce the total background level by one order of magnitude, as it is the goal for the second physics phase of the experiment. This work was supported by BMBF.