Characterization of the scintillation response of water-based liquid scintillator to alpha particles, and implications for particle identification

Abstract

Next-generation large-scale neutrino detectors, from Eos, at the 1 tonne scale, to Theia, at the 10s-of-ktonne scale, will utilize differences in both the scintillation and Cherenkov light emission for different particle species to perform background rejection. This manuscript presents measurements of the scintillation light yield and emission time profile of water-based liquid scintillator samples in response to $\alpha$ radiation. These measurements are used as input to simulation models used to make predictions for future detectors. In particular, we present the timing-based particle identification achievable in generic water-based scintillator detectors at the 4 tonne, 1 ktonne, and 100 ktonne scales. We find that $\alpha$/$\beta$ discrimination improves with increasing scintillation concentration and we identify better than 80% $\alpha$ rejection for 90% $\beta$ acceptance in 10% water-based liquid scintillator, at the 4 tonne scale.

References in corpus (29)

• Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
• First Results from KamLAND: Evidence for Reactor Anti-Neutrino Disappearance
• Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation by the K2K Experiment
• Improved Search for ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }\to {\bar{\nu }}_e$ Oscillations in the MiniBooNE Experiment
• Final results of Borexino Phase-I on low energy solar neutrino spectroscopy
• Current Status and Future Prospects of the SNO+ Experiment
• Constraints on Oscillation Parameters from ${\nu }_e$ Appearance and ${\nu }_{\mu }$ Disappearance in NOvA
• Theia: An advanced optical neutrino detector
• The Detector System of The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment
• The Physics and Nuclear Nonproliferation Goals of WATCHMAN: A WAter CHerenkov Monitor for ANtineutrinos
• Scintillation decay time and pulse shape discrimination in oxygenated and deoxygenated solutions of linear alkylbenzene for the SNO+ experiment
• An Experiment to Demonstrate Separation of Cherenkov and Scintillation Signals
• Characterization of water-based liquid scintillator for Cherenkov and scintillation separation
• Cherenkov and Scintillation Light Separation in Organic Liquid Scintillators
• Development, characterisation, and deployment of the SNO+ liquid scintillator
• Spectral Photon Sorting For Large-Scale Cherenkov and Scintillation Detectors
• MeV-scale performance of water-based and pure liquid scintillator detectors
• Cherenkov and Scintillation Light Separation Using Wavelength in LAB Based Liquid Scintillator
• Time Response of Water-based Liquid Scintillator from X-ray Excitation
• Detecting the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background in the future Water-based Liquid Scintillator Detector Theia
• Cherenkov and Scintillation Separation in Water-Based Liquid Scintillator using an LAPPD
• EOS: a demonstrator of hybrid optical detector technology
• Sensitivity of a low threshold directional detector to CNO-cycle solar neutrinos
• Measurement of the dependence of the light yields of linear alkylbenzene-based and EJ-301 scintillators on electron energy
• Measurement of $\alpha$-particle quenching in LAB based scintillator in independent small-scale experiments
• Low Energy Neutrino Detection with a Portable Water-based Liquid Scintillator Detector
• Measurement of proton light yield of water-based liquid scintillator
• Antineutrino sensitivity at THEIA
• Nu Tools: Exploring Practical Roles for Neutrinos in Nuclear Energy and Security