Bonn 2020 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 23: Dark Matter I

T 23.3: Talk

Tuesday, March 31, 2020, 17:35–17:50, H-HS I

Update of XENONnT's Gd-loaded water Cherenkov neutron veto — •Daniel Wenz for the XENON collaboration — Institut für Physik & Exzellenzcluster PRISMA, J. Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany

In 2018 the XENON1T experiment set the most stringent limits for the WIMP-Nucleon coupling for masses above 6 GeV/c2 utilizing a liquid xenon time projection chamber. Following this success a new and larger liquid xenon time projection chamber called XENONnT is currently constructed at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. Its sensitivity will be increased by more than an order of magnitude.

To achieve this ambitious goal the detector intrinsic neutron background must be reduced as well. Neutrons are capable to mimic WIMP signal by performing single scatter interactions and escaping the detectors volume. To counter this, XENONnT will be equipped with a new neutron veto that is based on a gadolinium-loaded water Cherenkov detector with a neutron tagging efficiency up to 84 %.

In this talk we present the current status of the neutron veto including the Gd-procurement and the measurement of the Gd-loaded water transparency, as well as discussing novel techniques for the calibration of the neutron-tagging efficiency and background discrimination strategies.