Cosmic Muon Rates and Neutron Background in a Backpack Radiation Detection System

1 20. Cosmic background radiation 20. COSMIC BACKGROUND RADIATION

The observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provides strong evidence for the hot big bang. The success of pri-mordial nucleosynthesis calculations (see Sec. 16, " Big-bang nucle-osynthesis ") requires a cosmic background radiation (CBR) characterized by a temperature kT ∼ 1 MeV at a redshift of z ≃ 10 9. In their pioneering work, Gamow, Alpher, and Herman [1] realized this and pred...

Cosmic Ray Muon Detection

Mutagenesis and Background Neutron Radiation

In microelectronics, single failure events sporadically occur which, in some areas, like plane and space navigation, could have catastrophic consequences. Preliminary estimations [1] and more recent experiments [2] indicate a correlation between these events and the Background Neutron Radiation (BNR) [3]. The mechanism of failure is the collision of a neutron from the BNR with an atomic nucleus...

Muon and Cosmogenic Neutron Detection in Borexino

Borexino, a liquid scintillator detector at LNGS, is designed for the detection of neutrinos and antineutrinos from the Sun, supernovae, nuclear reactors, and the Earth. The feeble nature of these signals requires a strong suppression of backgrounds below a few MeV. Very low intrinsic radiogenic contamination of all detector components needs to be accompanied by the efficient identification of ...

Cosmic Needles versus Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

It has been suggested by a number of authors that the 2.7K cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation might have arisen from the radiation from Population III objects thermalized by conducting cosmic graphite/iron needle-shaped dust. Due to lack of an accurate solution to the absorption properties of exceedingly elongated grains, in existing literature which studies the CMB thermalizing proces...