Data acquisition and analysis of the double beta experiment in Gran Sasso 1990–2003

• DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2003.12.013
• Publication Date: 2004-01-25T08:27:43Z
• Authors: H.V. Klapdor-Klei...; A. Dietz; I.V. Krivosheina; O. Chkvorets
• Keywords: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); 0103 physical sciences; FOS: Physical sciences; 01 natural sciences

Data acquisition in a long running underground experiment has its specific experimental challenges, concerning data acquisition, stability of the experiment and background reduction. These problems are addressed here for the HEIDELBERG-MOSCOW experiment, which collected data in the period August 1990 - May 2003. The measurement and the analysis of the data is presented. The duty cycle of the experiment was ~80%, the collected statistics is 71.7 kgy. The background achieved in the energy region of the Q value for double beta decay is 0.11 events/kg y keV. The two-neutrino accompanied half-life is determined on the basis of more than 100 000 events. The confidence level for the neutrinoless signal has been improved to a 4 sigma level.<br/>Full version (50 pages, 36 figures, 9 tables), zipped ps file (size ~21MB or pdf format (size ~26MB), can be found in http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/non_acc/super.html (corrected typos) In press in NIM A, 2004<br/>