Monte Carlo evaluation of the external gamma, neutron and muon induced background sources in the CUORE experiment

TL;DR

This paper assesses how well the CUORE experiment's shielding reduces external gamma, neutron, and muon backgrounds to enable sensitive detection of neutrinoless double beta decay in tellurium-130.

Contribution

It provides a Monte Carlo evaluation of external background sources and demonstrates the effectiveness of CUORE's shielding design in minimizing these backgrounds.

Findings

External backgrounds are reduced below 1.0E-02 c/keV/kg/y at the Q-value.

Shielding effectively suppresses environmental gamma, neutron, and muon backgrounds.

Background levels meet the requirements for the experiment's sensitivity goals.

Abstract

CUORE is a 1 ton scale cryogenic experiment aiming at the measurement of the Majorana mass of the electron neutrino. The detector is an array of 988 TeO2 bolometers used for a calorimetric detection of the two electrons emitted in the BB0n of 130Te. The sensitivity of the experiment to the lowest Majorana mass is determined by the rate of background events that can mimic a BB0n. In this paper we investigate the contribution of external sources i.e. environmental gammas, neutrons and cosmic ray muons to the CUORE background and show that the shielding setup designed for CUORE guarantees a reduction of this external background down to a level <1.0E-02 c/keV/kg/y at the Q-value, as required by the physical goal of the experiment.