TAO Conceptual Design Report: A Precision Measurement of the Reactor Antineutrino Spectrum with Sub-percent Energy Resolution

Abstract

The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO, also known as JUNO-TAO) is a satellite experiment of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO). A ton-level liquid scintillator detector will be placed at about 30 m from a core of the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant. The reactor antineutrino spectrum will be measured with sub-percent energy resolution, to provide a reference spectrum for future reactor neutrino experiments, and to provide a benchmark measurement to test nuclear databases. A spherical acrylic vessel containing 2.8 ton gadolinium-doped liquid scintillator will be viewed by 10 m^2 Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) of >50% photon detection efficiency with almost full coverage. The photoelectron yield is about 4500 per MeV, an order higher than any existing large-scale liquid scintillator detectors. The detector operates at -50 degree C to lower the dark noise of SiPMs to an acceptable level. The detector will measure about 2000 reactor antineutrinos per day, and is designed to be well shielded from cosmogenic backgrounds and ambient radioactivities to have about 10% background-to-signal ratio. The experiment is expected to start operation in 2022.

134 pages, 114 figures

References in corpus (2)

• A method of detector and event visualization with Unity in JUNO
• Measurement of the liquid scintillator nonlinear energy response to electron

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Sub-percent Precision Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation Parameters with JUNO
• Antineutrino Energy Spectrum Unfolding Based on the Daya Bay Measurement and Its Applications
• Review of Novel Approaches to Organic Liquid Scintillators in Neutrino Physics
• Exploring SMEFT Induced Non-Standard Interactions from COHERENT to Neutrino Oscillations
• Neutrino Electromagnetic Properties
• Performance of Hamamatsu VUV4 SiPMs for detecting liquid argon scintillation
• PROSPECT-II Physics Opportunities
• Mapping reactor neutrino spectra from TAO to JUNO
• Prospects for the detection of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with the experiments SK-Gd and JUNO
• Calibration Strategy of the JUNO-TAO Experiment
• Combined sensitivity of JUNO and KM3NeT/ORCA to the neutrino mass ordering
• A liquid scintillator for a neutrino Detector working at -50 degree
• Detector optimization to reduce the cosmogenic neutron backgrounds in the TAO experiment
• Evaluation of the KLauS ASIC at low temperature
• Prospects of detecting the reactor $\overline{{\nu }_e}$-Ar coherent elastic scattering with a low threshold dual-phase argon time projection chamber at Taishan
• A ROOT based detector geometry and event visualization system for JUNO-TAO
• Performance of plastic scintillator modules for top veto tracker at Taishan Antineutrino Observatory
• Status and Prospects of the JUNO Experiment
• Analysis of reactor burnup simulation uncertainties for antineutrino spectrum prediction
• JUNO's prospects for determining the neutrino mass ordering