Active Shielding for Future Large-Scale Dark Matter Experiments

This work presents two shielding concepts to reduce muon-induced and ambient background sources in future cryogenic dark matter experiments below 1 event/tonne/year: a water Cherenkov detector and a Gd-loaded liquid scintillator. Both veto systems were designed and optimized through GEANT4 Monte Carlo simulations. In this context, an accurate model of the light collection in WCDs was implemented and validated via prototype measurements.