Speaker
Description
The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) aims to perform a zero background search for light dark matter. The ability of the experiment to veto standard model backgrounds has been studied in detail based on Geant4 simulations. A critical background process for the detector design comes from photonuclear reactions of few-GeV photons with tungsten. In Geant4, these are modeled using the Bertini intranuclear cascade model. While both Geant4's hadronic models and the Bertini cascade in particular have been broadly validated, the design of LDMX is sensitive to the rates and topologies of very rare final states that have received significantly less scrutiny. This contribution will detail our efforts of comparing such final states between several alternative event generators as well as results from replacing the Bertini cascade for photonuclear reactions in Geant4 with the PEANUT model from FLUKA. The latter was made possible thanks to an interface to FLUKA's hadronic models to Geant4 that is currently being developed by the FLUKA@CERN collaboration.
