Exploring coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering using reactor electron antineutrinos in the NEON experiment

Abstract

Neutrino elastic scattering observation with NaI (NEON) is an experiment designed to detect neutrino-nucleus coherent scattering using reactor electron antineutrinos. NEON is based on an array of six NaI(Tl) crystals with a total mass of 13.3 kg, located at the tendon gallery that is 23.7 m away from a reactor core with a thermal power of 2.8 GW in the Hanbit nuclear power complex. The installation of the NEON detector was completed in December 2020, and since May 2021, the detector has acquired data at full reactor power. Based on the observed light yields of the NaI crystals of approximately 22, number of photoelectrons per unit keV electron-equivalent energy (keVee), and 6 counts/kg/keV/day background level at 2-6 keVee energy, coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering observation sensitivity is evaluated as more than 3$\sigma$ assuming one-year reactor-on and 100 days reactor-off data, 0.2 keVee energy threshold, and 7 counts/keV/kg/day background in the signal region of 0.2-0.5 keVee. This paper describes the design of the NEON detector, including the shielding arrangement, configuration of NaI(Tl) crystals, and associated operating systems. The initial performance and associated sensitivity of the experiment are also presented.

21 pages 27 figures

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Cited by in corpus (19)

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• New constraints on coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering by the nuGeN experiment
• Upgrading the COSINE-100 Experiment for Enhanced Sensitivity to Low-Mass Dark Matter Detection
• Sensitivities for coherent elastic scattering of solar and supernova neutrinos with future NaI(Tl) dark matter search detectors of COSINE-200/1T
• Waveform Simulation for Scintillation Characteristics of NaI(Tl) Crystal
• A neutrino window to scalar leptoquarks: from low energy to colliders
• Upgrade of NaI(Tl) crystal encapsulation for the NEON experiment
• New Constraints on Axion-Like Particles with the NEON Detector at a Nuclear Reactor
• Performance of plastic scintillator modules for top veto tracker at Taishan Antineutrino Observatory
• Incoherent solar-neutrino scattering off the stable Tl-isotopes
• Scintillation characteristics of an undoped CsI crystal at low-temperature for dark matter search
• Searches for CEνNS and Physics beyond the Standard Model using Skipper-CCDs at CONNIE
• Particle background characterization and prediction for the NUCLEUS reactor CE$\nu$NS experiment
• Measuring the Low-Energy Weak Mixing Angle with Supernova Neutrinos
• Validation of the COSINE-100U NaI(Tl) Encapsulation for Low-Temperature Operation in Liquid Scintillator
• Testing lepton non-unitarity with the next generation of Germanium-based CE$\nu$NS reactor experiments