Jacques Farine
Laurentian University
Sudbury, Ontario, Canada
Abstract:
The background challenges of low energy, ultra-low count rate experiments will be reviewed first. These include source enrichment; purification to and monitoring of extremely low levels of radioactive isotopes in the detector materials and in the detector shielding; continued purification (or not); veto techniques; and reduction of the cosmic ray flux by locating the experiment at kilometers depths in the earth's crust.
Low energy backgrounds require the detector response be understood outside of the physics analysis window. This aspect will be discussed in more details for the case of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). The techniques developed to assess time and space variation of backgrounds in the 1 kT active mass of D2O will also be presented.
In conclusion, the development of low background techniques for EXO, the Enriched Xenon Observatory for double beta decay, will be presented.