Letter of Intent: The Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE)

Abstract

Neutron tagging in Gadolinium-doped water may play a significant role in reducing backgrounds from atmospheric neutrinos in next generation proton-decay searches using megaton-scale Water Cherenkov detectors. Similar techniques might also be useful in the detection of supernova neutrinos. Accurate determination of neutron tagging efficiencies will require a detailed understanding of the number of neutrons produced by neutrino interactions in water as a function of momentum transferred. We propose the Atmospheric Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE), designed to measure the neutron yield of atmospheric neutrino interactions in gadolinium-doped water. An innovative aspect of the ANNIE design is the use of precision timing to localize interaction vertices in the small fiducial volume of the detector. We propose to achieve this by using early production of LAPPDs (Large Area Picosecond Photodetectors). This experiment will be a first application of these devices demonstrating their feasibility for Water Cherenkov neutrino detectors.

References in corpus (13)

• Observation of Electron Neutrino Appearance in a Muon Neutrino Beam
• Neutrino and antineutrino quasielastic interactions with nuclei
• Electroweak nuclear response in quasi-elastic regime
• The Large Analog Bandwidth Recorder And Digitizer with Ordered Readout (LABRADOR) ASIC
• The extended-track reconstruction for MiniBooNE
• A 15 GSa/s, 1.5 GHz Bandwidth Waveform Digitizing ASIC
• TARGET: A multi-channel digitizer chip for very-high-energy gamma-ray telescopes
• Gadolinium in water Cherenkov detectors improves detection of supernova ${\nu }_e$
• Observation of Neutrons with a Gadolinium Doped Water Cerenkov Detector
• The first version Buffered Large Analog Bandwidth (BLAB1) ASIC for high luminosity collider and extensive radio neutrino detectors
• Sub-10ps Monolithic and Low-power Photodetector Readout
• Expression of Interest: The Atmospheric Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE)
• Using Fast Photosensors in Water Cherenkov Neutrino Detectors

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Tagging Spallation Backgrounds with Showers in Water-Cherenkov Detectors
• Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE): Preliminary Results and Physics Phase Proposal
• MeV-scale performance of water-based and pure liquid scintillator detectors
• The design and performance of a prototype water Cherenkov optical time-projection chamber
• Multiple-photon disambiguation on stripline-anode Micro-Channel Plates
• Application of machine learning techniques to lepton energy reconstruction in water Cherenkov detectors
• TITUS: the Tokai Intermediate Tank for the Unoscillated Spectrum
• Characterisation and testing of a prototype $6\times 6$ cm${}^2$ Argonne MCP-PMT
• A Modular Data Acquisition System using the 10 GSa/s PSEC4 Waveform Recording Chip
• TITUS: An Intermediate Distance Detector for the Hyper-Kamiokande Neutrino Beam
• Characterization of the ETEL D784UKFLB 11 inch Photomultiplier Tube
• ANNIE Phase II Reconstruction Techniques