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Astrophysics and Astronomy

University of Massachusetts Amherst

2018

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Alpha Radiation Studies And Related Backgrounds In The Darkside-50 Detector, Alissa Monte Oct 2018

Alpha Radiation Studies And Related Backgrounds In The Darkside-50 Detector, Alissa Monte

Doctoral Dissertations

DarkSide-50 is the current phase of the DarkSide direct dark matter search program, operating underground at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. The detector is a dual-phase argon Time Projection Chamber (TPC), designed for direct detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), and housed within a veto system of liquid scintillator and water Cherenkov detectors. Since switching to a target of low radioactivity argon extracted from underground sources in April 2015, the background is no longer dominated by naturally occurring 39Ar. However, alpha backgrounds from radon and its daughters remain, both from the liquid argon bulk and internal …