The veto system of the DarkSide-50 experiment

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Published 16 March 2016 © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab srl
, , Citation P. Agnes et al 2016 JINST 11 P03016 DOI 10.1088/1748-0221/11/03/P03016

1748-0221/11/03/P03016

Abstract

Nuclear recoil events produced by neutron scatters form one of the most important classes of background in WIMP direct detection experiments, as they may produce nuclear recoils that look exactly like WIMP interactions. In DarkSide-50, we both actively suppress and measure the rate of neutron-induced background events using our neutron veto, composed of a boron-loaded liquid scintillator detector within a water Cherenkov detector. This paper is devoted to the description of the neutron veto system of DarkSide-50, including the detector structure, the fundamentals of event reconstruction and data analysis, and basic performance parameters.

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