NEUTRON BACKGROUND STUDIES FOR THE EDELWEISS WIMP SEARCH

Protection against the neutron background will be one of the key issues for the next generation of Dark Matter Direct Detection experiments. We review and discuss critically the main contributions for the neutron background – neutrons from rock fission and alpha-n reactions, muon-induced neutron background, deep-inelastic interactions, internal U/Th contamination. We discuss the impact of these backgrounds for the EDELWEISS-II experiment, designed to reach a sensitivity of the order of 10⁻² event/kg/day, and for an experiment at the one-ton scale.