Speaker
Mr
Brian Lenardo
(Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Description
Direct searches for dark matter require ultra-low-radioactivity techniques. In recent years, such experiments using noble liquids (especially liquid xenon) have obtained the lowest background levels in the field. Along with the development of this technology, there has been a continued effort in the community to better understand the detailed scintillation and ionization responses of noble liquids in the presence of low-energy ionizing radiation. As this body of knowledge is reaching a mature state, a unified software framework for simulating scintillation and ionization production in these detectors is strongly needed. In this talk, I introduce NEST: Noble Element Simulation Technique, which is an open-source simulation package based on physics models informed by the world's best data on the subject. I will show how the technique handles both electronic recoils (which comprise most of the background in a dark-matter search) and nuclear recoils (which are the expected signal), and their differing features that lead to the ability to perform background rejection.
Primary author
Mr
Brian Lenardo
(Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Co-author
Dr
Aaron Manalaysay
(University of California, Davis)
