Exploiting the directional sensitivity of the Double Chooz near detector

Abstract

In scintillator detectors, the forward displacement of the neutron in the reaction ${\bar{\nu }}_e+p\to e^{+}+n$ provides neutrino directional information as demonstrated by the CHOOZ reactor experiment with 2,500 events. The near detector of the forthcoming Double Chooz experiment will collect $1.6\times 10^5$ events per year, enough to determine the average neutrino direction with a $1\sigma$ half-cone aperture of $2.3^{\circ }$ in one year. It is more difficult to separate the two Chooz reactors that are viewed at a separation angle $\varphi =30^{\circ }$. If their strengths are known and approximately equal, the azimuthal location of each reactor is obtained with $\pm 6^{\circ }$ ($1\sigma$) and the probability of confusing them with a single source is less than 11%. Five year's data reduce this ``confusion probability'' to less than 0.3%, i.e., a $3\sigma$ separation is possible. All of these numbers improve rapidly with increasing angular separation of the sources. For a setup with $\varphi =90^{\circ }$ and one year's data, the azimuthal $1\sigma$ uncertainty for each source decreases to $\pm 3.2^{\circ }$. Of course, for Double Chooz the two reactor locations are known, allowing one instead to measure their individual one-year integrated power output to $\pm 11$ ($1\sigma$), and their five-year integrated output to $\pm 4.8$ ($1\sigma$).

7 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Search for neutrino oscillations on a long base-line at the CHOOZ nuclear power station
• The angular distribution of the reaction ${\bar{\nu }}_e+p\to e^{+}+n$
• Determination of neutrino incoming direction in the CHOOZ experiment and Supernova explosion location by scintillator detectors
• Probing the Earth's interior with a large-volume liquid scintillator detector
• Probing the Earth's interior with the LENA detector

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Measuring Directionality in Double-Beta Decay and Neutrino Interactions with Kiloton-Scale Scintillation Detectors
• Correlated and Integrated Directionality for sub-MeV solar neutrinos in Borexino
• Obtaining supernova directional information using the neutrino matter oscillation pattern
• Mimicking diffuse supernova antineutrinos with the Sun as a source
• Organic Liquid TPCs for Neutrino Physics
• Directional Response of Several Geometries for Reactor-Neutrino Detectors