Background Rejection in Highly Pixelated Solid-State Detectors

TL;DR

This paper discusses background rejection techniques in highly pixelated solid-state detectors, focusing on the DAMIC experiment's methods for identifying radioactive backgrounds and their application to future neutrino experiments.

Contribution

It introduces background-identification strategies for silicon CCDs in dark matter searches and proposes their adaptation for large-scale neutrino experiments to achieve zero-background.

Findings

DAMIC can measure activities of all $eta$ emitters from decay chains.

Strategies enable background suppression in silicon-based detectors.

Proposed methods aim for zero-background in future large-scale experiments.

Abstract

Highly pixelated solid-state detectors offer outstanding capabilities in the identification and suppression of backgrounds from natural radioactivity. We present the background-identification strategies developed for the DAMIC experiment, which employs silicon charge-coupled devices to search for dark matter. DAMIC has demonstrated the capability to disentangle and measure the activities of every $\beta$ emitter from the $^{32}$Si, $^{238}$U and $^{232}$Th decay chains in the silicon target. Similar strategies will be adopted by the Selena Neutrino Experiment, which will employ hybrid amorphous $^{82}$Se/CMOS imagers to perform spectroscopy of $\beta\beta$ decay and solar neutrinos. We present the proposed experimental strategy for Selena to achieve zero-background in a 100-ton-year exposure.