Speaker
Description
For many of the deep underground experiments searching for dark matter some of the most concerning neutron backgrounds come from the ($\alpha$,n) process in the cavern or detector materials. Traditionally the focus of the dark matter community has been the calculation/simulation of the background based on ($\alpha$,n) reaction evaluations and U/Th material assays. Dark matter working groups have been considering supplementing the evaluations with direct measurements either performed in new facilities or those already performed by our nuclear physics colleagues. I will describe the nuclei that are the focus of our dark matter/neutrino sub-working group on ($\alpha$,n) and also how measurement facilities or other experimental verifications might be an enormous help on this problem.
