Measurement of Cosmogenic Production Rates in Ge with CDMSlite

Abstract

The majority of matter in the Universe is non-luminous, non-baryonic, and as of yet undiscovered. The SuperCDMS experiment searches for this "dark matter" in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), operating semiconducting detectors at cryogenic temperatures to measure energy deposits from dark matter interactions. These efforts have resulted in world leading limits on the interactions of dark matter with ordinary matter. The next phase of SuperCDMS is under construction at SNOLAB near Sudbury, ON. Interaction of cosmic rays with detector material can result in the production of radioactive isotopes, the decay of which results in background in the measured energy spectrum. Tritium is expected to be the limiting background for SuperCDMS SNOLAB. Production rates of tritium and other cosmogenic isotopes are not well known, with a wide spread in theoretical calculated rates and only a single measurement previously published for tritium. The work in this thesis details the measurement of cosmogenic production rates using low energy spectra measured by SuperCDMS.