  The Majorana Collaboration is constructing a system containing 40 kg of HPGe
detectors to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of a future tonne-scale
experiment capable of probing the neutrino mass scale in the inverted-hierarchy
region. To realize this, a major goal of the Majorana Demonstrator is to
demonstrate a path forward to achieving a background rate at or below 1
cnt/(ROI-t-y) in the 4 keV region of interest around the Q-value at 2039 keV.
This goal is pursued through a combination of a significant reduction of
radioactive impurities in construction materials with analytical methods for
background rejection, for example using powerful pulse shape analysis
techniques profiting from the p-type point contact HPGe detectors technology.
The effectiveness of these methods is assessed using simulations of the
different background components whose purity levels are constrained from
radioassay measurements.
