Silicon detector simulations as a tool for Nab experiment detector characterization.

The Nab experiment aims to measure the electron-neutrino angular correlation ”a” and Fierz interference term ”b” of free neutron β decay to set competitive limits on CKM unitarity and tensor and scalar couplings. The experiment measures the angular correlation by extracting the proton momentum from its time of flight with the electron as the start signal Along with a measurement of the electron energies this allows for a determination of a. The electrons and protons are measured with large segmented silicon detector. Due to stringent requirements on timing uncertainties it is critical that the detector signal response is well understood.

The Nab Event Shape Simulation Effort (NESSE) is a Python based solid state detector simulation developed to help characterize and better understand the timing and energy response of the Nab detectors. In this talk I will present the current status of the NESSE simulations and discuss the impacts of temperature, impurity concentration, and bias voltage on detector signals.