Mitigation of $^{42}$Ar/$^{42}$K background for the GERDA Phase II experiment

Understand

Background coming from the $^{42}$Ar decay chain is considered to be one of the most relevant for the GERDA experiment, which aims to search of the neutrinoless double beta decay of $^{76}$Ge.

• The sensitivity strongly relies on the absence of background around the Q-value of the decay.
• Background coming from $^{42}$K, a progeny of $^{42}$Ar, can contribute to that background via electrons from the continuous spectrum with an endpoint of 3.5 MeV.
• Research and development on the suppression methods targeting this source of background were performed at the low-background test facility LArGe.