Methods for Pulse Shape Discrimination in the LEGEND experiment

The Large Enriched Germanium Experiment for Neutrinoless ββ decay (LEGEND) is a phased search for 0νββ in the ⁷⁶Ge isotope with enriched high-purity germanium (HPGe) detectors. The first phase, LEGEND-200, successfully acquired data for over a year with 142 kg of HPGe detectors. LEGEND-200 has a background goal of less than 2 x 10^-4 cts /(keV kg yr). This requires excellent background mitigation capabilities. The sources of background (contributing in the region of interest) include the alphas and betas originating from the detector surface and gamma rays that undergo Compton scattering in the detector bulk. These background events, however, have a different event topology and pulse shape compared to the single-site event candidates for 0nbb. This talk will discuss the methods developed by LEGEND for background mitigation using the pulse shape discrimination and its application to the LEGEND-200 data.