GeMSE: A new Low-Background Facility for Meteorite and Material Screening

Abstract

We are currently setting up a facility for low-background gamma-ray spectrometry based on a HPGe detector. It is dedicated to material screening for the XENON and DARWIN dark matter projects as well as to the characterization of meteorites. The detector will be installed in a medium depth ($\sim$620 m.w.e.) underground laboratory in Switzerland with several layers of shielding and an active muon-veto. The GeMSE facility will be operational by fall 2015 with an expected background rate of $\sim$250 counts/day (100-2700 keV).

The following article appeared in AIP Conf. Proc. 1672, 120004 (2015) and may be found at http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/proceeding/aipcp/10.1063/1.4928010. The muon spectrum in Figure 4 (left) was corrected due to a bug in the code. After correction the muon flux is reduced by a factor of about 3