20:T423,The M ajorana D emonstrator will search for the neutrinoless double-beta(ββ0ν)decay of the isotopeGe with a mixed array of enriched and natural germanium detectors. The observation of this rare decay would indicate that the neutrino is its own antiparticle, demonstrate that lepton number is not conserved, and provide information on the absolute mass scale of the neutrino. The D emonstrator is being assembled at the 4850-foot level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. The array will be situated in a low-background environment and surrounded by passive and active shielding. Here we describe the science goals of the D emonstrator and the details of its design.21:T4ff,We describe a physics simulation software framework, MaGe, that is based on the Geant4 simulation toolkit. MaGe is used to simulate the response of ultra-low radioactive background detectors to ionizing radiation, specifically the Majorana and Gerda neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments. Majorana and Gerda use high-purity germanium detectors to search for the neutrinoless double-beta decay of ⁷⁶ Ge and MaGe is jointly developed between these two collaborations. The MaGe framework contains the geometry models of common objects, prototypes, test stands and the actual experiments. It also implements customized event generators, Geant4 physics lists and output formats. All of these features are available as class libraries that are typically compiled into a single executable. The user selects the particular experimental setup implementation at run-time via macros. The combination of all these common classes into one framework reduces duplication of efforts, eases comparison between simulated data and experiment and simplifies the addition of new detectors to be simulated. This paper focuses on the software framework, custom event generators and physics lists.

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