A liquid scintillator for a neutrino Detector working at -50 degree

Abstract

A liquid scintillator (LS) is developed for the Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO), a ton-level neutrino detector to measure the reactor antineutrino spectrum with sub-percent energy resolution by adopting Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) as photosensor. To reduce the dark noise of SiPMs to an acceptable level, the LS has to work at -50 degree or lower. A customized apparatus based on a charge-coupled device (CCD) is developed to study the transparency of the liquid samples in a cryostat. We find that the water content in LS results in transparency degradation at low temperature, which can be cured by bubbling dry nitrogen to remove water. Adding 0.05% ethanol as co-solvent cures the solubility decrease problem of the fluors PPO and bis-MSB at low temperature. Finally, a Gadoliniumdoped liquid scintillator (GdLS), with 0.1% Gd by weight, 2 g/L PPO, 1 mg/L bis-MSB, and 0.05% ethanol by weight in the solvent LAB, shows good transparency at -50 degree and also good light yield.

7 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Sterile neutrino search at NEOS Experiment
• Improved measurements of the neutrino mixing angle ${\theta }_{13}$ with the Double Chooz detector
• Updated Summation Model: An Improved Agreement with the Daya Bay Antineutrino Fluxes
• TAO Conceptual Design Report: A Precision Measurement of the Reactor Antineutrino Spectrum with Sub-percent Energy Resolution
• A complete optical model for liquid-scintillator detectors

Cited by in corpus (6)

• PandaX-xT: a Multi-ten-tonne Liquid Xenon Observatory at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory
• Review of Novel Approaches to Organic Liquid Scintillators in Neutrino Physics
• Calibration Strategy of the JUNO-TAO Experiment
• Study on SiPM performance at low temperatures between $-60^{\circ }$C and $-20^{\circ }$C
• 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