Topological charge-sharing background reduction for the Silicon Drift Detectors used by the VIP experiment at LNGS

: Large area Silicon Drift Detectors are employed in high sensitivity tests of the Pauli Exclusion Principle by the VIP-2 Collaboration. The experiment is operated in the extremely low cosmic background environment of the Gran Sasso underground National Laboratory of INFN. In this work an off-line analysis method is proposed which provides an additional background reduction, as well as a better calibration procedure. The study concerns in particular the charge sharing between nearby cells, and is applied to the data set collected during the 2018 VIP-2 campaign. The cross-talk effect inside the detectors array is described and an effective topological method to reject the background induced by charge sharing is outlined.