Dortmund 2021 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 68: Neutrino physics without accelerators III

T 68.8: Talk

Wednesday, March 17, 2021, 17:50–18:05, Tr

Simulation of the liquid argon veto system in Gerda and beyond — •Luigi Pertoldi^1,2 and Christoph Wiesinger¹ for the GERDA collaboration — ¹Physik-Department, Technische Universität München, Garching — ²INFN Padova, 35131 Padua, Italy

Liquid argon (LAr) is widely employed in physics experiments as an active detector medium, thanks to its scintillation properties. In the Gerda experiment, LAr has served the three-fold role of cooling liquid for germanium detectors, passive and active shield against backgrounds. This technology choice has proven to be an effective background suppression strategy for Gerda to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay (0νββ) of ⁷⁶Ge in a background-free regime. In order to characterize the LAr veto system, a Monte Carlo framework has been developed to simulate the propagation of scintillation photons in the experimental setup and determine the expected veto condition for various event types. Data from special calibration runs is used to compensate for unknown optical parameters and effectively tune the simulation. Based on these expectations, a full background model of physics data has been obtained. This model provides insights on the background composition in the region of interest for the 0νββ search and is a fundamental input to exotic physics searches in the full energy range. In this talk, I will review the tools and the techniques developed to model the Gerda LAr veto system and present preliminary results. This work has been supported in part by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR), The Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), BMBF and DFG via the SFB1258.