Verification of the Majorana-Gerda Simulation Package (MaGe)

Determining whether neutrinos are Majorana or Dirac particles is of vital importance to the physics community. The Majorana experiment seeks to address this question by searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay using germanium crystals enriched in $^{76}$Ge. The Majorana and Gerda\footnote{The Gerda Collaboration, Gerda. (2004) 12 Jan 2006 http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/ge76/proposal\_21sept.pdf} collaborations have jointly developed MaGe, a Geant4\footnote{S. Agnostinelli et al., Geant4 - A Simulation Toolkit. Nucl. Instr. and Meth. {\bf A 506} (2003), 250} and ROOT\footnote{Brun, R. and F. Rademakers, ROOT - An Object Oriented Data Analysis Framework. Nucl. Instr. and Meth. {\bf A 389} (1997), 81} based simulation framework, to aid in the design and analysis phases of both experiments. Several Monte Carlo studies of existing detectors were performed using the MaGe package. Comparisons between the experimental data and the simulation results are used to verify MaGe's performance. The simulations that will be discussed are a study of neutron production from a SLAC e$^{-}$ beam experiment\footnote{S. Taniguchi et al. Nucl. Instr. and Meth. {\bf A 503} (2003), 595}, studies of a PNNL low- background HPGe material sampling detector with multiple sources, and a study of a LANL HPGe Clover detector with an AmBe source. This work is supported by the DOE Office of Nuclear Physics.