First study of neutron tagging with a water Cherenkov detector

2008/11/06 by Kamiokande Collaboration, H. Watanabe, H. Zhang +97 · 85 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Bar (unit) #Cherenkov detector #Cherenkov radiation #Coincidence #Detector #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutron #Neutron temperature #Nuclear physics #Optics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #hep-ex

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2009.03.002

published in Astroparticle Physics 31(4), 320-328 (Elsevier BV) · 17 pages, 11 figures

arxiv created 2008/11/06 · openalex publication_date 2009/03/19 · arxiv updated 2015/05/12 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

A first study of neutron tagging is conducted in Super--Kamiokande, a 50,000-ton water Cherenkov detector. The tagging efficiencies of thermal neutrons are evaluated in a 0.2 % GdCl₃-water solution and pure water. They are determined to be, respectively, 66.7 % for events above 3 MeV and 20 % with corresponding background probabilities of 2 × 10^-4 and 3 × 10^-2. This newly developed technique may enable water Cherenkov detectors to identify ν_e's geological or astrophysical sources as well as those produced by commercial reactors via the delayed coincidence scheme.

Citations

• Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
• Observation of a neutrino burst from the supernova SN1987A
• GADZOOKS! Antineutrino Spectroscopy with Large Water Cerenkov Detectors

Cited by

• Neutrino Signal of Electron-Capture Supernovae from Core Collapse to Cooling
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