HFIR

Exploring Low Energy Excess in MINER with sapphire detectors using Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE)

arXiv:2605.31190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As cryogenic detectors push toward ever-lower energy thresholds, their sensitivity is increasingly constrained by a persistent low-energy background known as the low-energy excess (LEE). We report observation of LEE in the MINER experiment using a sapphire ($\mathrm{Al_2O_3}$) detector at energies around 200 eV, with the excess reproducibly reappearing after each non-operational warm-up period. To address this limiting background, we implement...