Abstract
The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR is an experiment constructed to search for neutrinoless double-beta decays in germanium-76 and to demonstrate the feasibility to deploy a ton-scale experiment in a phased and modular fashion. It consists of two modular arrays of natural and 76Ge-enriched germanium detectors totaling 44.1kg (29.7kg enriched detectors), located at the 4850’ level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, USA. Data taken with this setup since summer 2015 at different construction stages of the experiment show a clear reduction of the observed background index around the ROI for 0νββ- decay search due to improvements in shielding. We discuss the statistical approaches to search for a धνββ-signal and derive the physics sensitivity for an expected exposure of 10kg· y from enriched detectors using a profile likelihood based hypothesis test in combination with toy Monte Carlo data.
Highlights
The Majorana Demonstrator is a rare event search experiment designed to search for the neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) of 76Ge [1]
Statistical methods for physics searches A variety of Bayesian and frequentist statistical methods are in use by the experiments searching for neutrinoless double beta decay
In [8], the Majorana Collaboration used the FeldmanCousins method [9] on a first dataset of the Majorana Demonstrator to derive an upper limit on the 0νββ half-life
Summary
The Majorana Demonstrator is a rare event search experiment designed to search for the neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) of 76Ge [1]. In [8], the Majorana Collaboration used the FeldmanCousins method [9] on a first dataset of the Majorana Demonstrator to derive an upper limit on the 0νββ half-life.
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