First study of neutron tagging with a water Cherenkov detector

H. Watanabe, H. Zhang, K. Abe, Y. Hayato, T. Iida, M. Ikeda, J. Kameda, K. Kobayashi, Y. Koshio, M. Miura, S. Moriyama, M. Nakahata, S. Nakayama, Y. Obayashi, H. Ogawa, H. Sekiya, M. Shiozawa, Y. Suzuki, A. Takeda, Y. TakenagaY. Takeuchi, K. Ueno, K. Ueshima, S. Yamada, S. Hazama, I. Higuchi, C. Ishihara, T. Kajita, K. Kaneyuki, G. Mitsuka, H. Nishino, K. Okumura, N. Tanimoto, S. Clark, S. Desai, F. Dufour, E. Kearns, S. Likhoded, M. Litos, J. Raaf, J. L. Stone, L. R. Sulak, W. Wang, M. Goldhaber, K. Bays, D. Casper, J. P. Cravens, J. Dunmore, J. Griskevich, W. R. Kropp, D. W. Liu, S. Mine, C. Regis, M. B. Smy, H. W. Sobel, K. S. Ganezer, J. Hill, W. E. Keig, J. S. Jang, I. S. Jeong, J. Y. Kim, I. T. Lim, M. Fechner, K. Scholberg, C. W. Walter, R. Wendel, S. Tasaka, G. Guillian, J. G. Learned, S. Matsuno, M. D. Messier, Y. Watanabe, T. Hasegawa, T. Ishida, T. Ishii, T. Kobayashi, T. Nakadaira, K. Nakamura, K. Nishikawa, Y. Oyama, K. Sakashita, T. Sekiguchi, T. Tsukamoto, A. T. Suzuki, A. K. Ichikawa, A. Minamino, T. Nakaya, M. Yokoyama, T. J. Haines, S. Dazeley, R. Svoboda, R. Gran, A. Habig, Y. Fukuda, Y. Itow, T. Tanaka, C. K. Jung, C. McGrew, A. Sarrat, R. Terri, C. Yanagisawa, N. Tamura, Y. Idehara, H. Ishino, A. Kibayashi, M. Sakuda, Y. Kuno, M. Yoshida, S. B. Kim, B. S. Yang, T. Ishizuka, H. Okazawa, Y. Choi, H. K. Seo, Y. Furuse, K. Nishijima, Y. Yokosawa, M. Koshiba, Y. Totsuka, M. R. Vagins, S. Chen, Z. Deng, G. Gong, Y. Liu, T. Xue, D. Kielczewska, H. G. Berns, K. K. Shiraishi, E. Thrane, R. J. Wilkes

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Abstract

A first study of neutron tagging is conducted in Super-Kamiokande, a 50,000 ton water Cherenkov detector. The tagging efficiencies of thermal neutrons are evaluated in a 0.2% GdCl3-water solution and pure water. They are determined to be, respectively, 66.7% for events above 3 MeV and 20% with corresponding background probabilities of 2 × 10- 4 and 3 × 10- 2. This newly developed technique may enable water Cherenkov detectors to identify over(ν, ̄)e's from astrophysical sources as well as those produced by commercial reactors via the delayed coincidence scheme.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)320-328
Number of pages9
JournalAstroparticle Physics
Volume31
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2009

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the Kamioka Mining and Smelting Company. Super-Kamiokande has been built and operated with funds provided by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the US Department of Energy, and the US National Science Foundation. This work has been partially supported by the Korean Research Foundation (BK21), the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 10575056, and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research in Japan.

Keywords

  • Gadolinium
  • Neutron tagging
  • Water Cherenkov detector

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