Muon and Cosmogenic Neutron Detection in Borexino

Understand

Borexino, a liquid scintillator detector at LNGS, is designed for the detection of neutrinos and antineutrinos from the Sun, supernovae, nuclear reactors, and the Earth.

• The feeble nature of these signals requires a strong suppression of backgrounds below a few MeV.
• Very low intrinsic radiogenic contamination of all detector components needs to be accompanied by the efficient identification of muons and of muon-induced backgrounds.
• Muons produce unstable nuclei by spallation processes along their trajectory through the detector whose decays can mimic the expected signals; for isotopes with half-lives longer than a few seconds, the dead time induced by a muon-related veto becomes unacceptably long, unless its application can be restricted to a sub-volume along the muon track.