Clean room design considerations for deep-underground science and engineering laboratories

摘要

This paper presents the factors that affect the clean room shielding design at the deep-underground science and engineering laboratory (DUSEL), for enhancing detection of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP), neutrino or double beta decay signals. The goal of the shielded clean room is to minimize the neutron and gamma-ray background and spurious signals, including secondary particles generated within shielding materials, permitting increased probability of detection of signals arising from WIMP and other particles of interest. Various arrangement options of shielded blocks made of paraffin and lead are examined to reduce the background from intrinsic uranium/thorium trace sources and high energy charged cosmic particles that interact with passive shielding material. A new shield block material is proposed and compared with other ordinary shield block arrangements currently used in detector passive shielding designs.