Measurement of proton light yield of water-based liquid scintillator

Abstract

The proton light yield of liquid scintillators is an important property in the context of their use in large-scale neutrino experiments, with direct implications for neutrino-proton scattering measurements and the discrimination of fast neutrons from inverse beta-decay coincidence signals. This work presents the first measurement of the proton light yield of a water-based liquid scintillator (WbLS) formulated from 5% linear alkyl benzene (LAB), at energies below 20 MeV, as well as a measurement of the proton light yield of a pure LAB + 2 g/L 2,5-diphenyloxazole (PPO) mixture (LABPPO). The measurements were performed using a double time-of-flight method and a pulsed neutron beam from the 88-Inch Cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The proton light yields were measured relative to that of a 477 keV electron. The relative proton light yield of WbLS was approximately 3.8% lower than that of LABPPO, itself exhibiting a relative proton light yield $15-20\%$ higher than previous measurements of an analogous anoxic sample. The observed quenching is not compatible with the Birks model for either material, but is well described with the addition of Chou's bimolecular quenching term.

14 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Observation of electron-antineutrino disappearance at Daya Bay
• The SNO+ Experiment
• Development, characterisation, and deployment of the SNO+ liquid scintillator
• Proton Light Yield in Organic Scintillators using a Double Time-of-Flight Technique
• Measurement of the proton light response of various LAB based scintillators and its implication for supernova neutrino detection via neutrino-proton scattering
• Low Energy Light Yield of Fast Plastic Scintillators
• Neutron Spectroscopy for Pulsed Beams with Frame Overlap using a Double Time-of-Flight Technique
• Scintillator light yield measurements with waveform digitizers

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Review of Novel Approaches to Organic Liquid Scintillators in Neutrino Physics
• Characterization of the scintillation response of water-based liquid scintillator to alpha particles, and implications for particle identification