Attenuation length measurements of liquid scintillator with LabVIEW and reliability evaluation of the device

TL;DR

This paper presents a LabVIEW-based device for measuring liquid scintillator attenuation length, evaluates its stability and accuracy, and compares purification methods for LAB used in neutrino experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a reliable, high-precision measurement system for liquid scintillator attenuation length and proposes a method to assess device reliability based on Beer-Lambert law.

Findings

Attenuation length of Gd-LS measured as 15.10 ± 0.35 m.

Device stability and precision with sigma/mean at 0.4%.

Purification methods for LAB compared in the study.

Abstract

The attenuation length measuring device was constructed by using oscilloscope and LabVIEW for signal acquisition and processing. The performance of the device has been tested with a variety of ways, the test results show that the set-up has a good stability and high precision (sigma/mean reached 0.4 percent). Besides, the accuracy of the measurement system will decrease by about 17 percent if a filter is used. The attenuation length of gadolinium-loaded liquid scintillator (Gd-LS) was measured as 15.10 plus or minus 0.35 m where Gd-LS was heavily used in Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment. In addition, one method based on the Beer-Lambert law was proposed to investigate the reliability of the measurement device, the R-square reached 0.9995. Moreover, three purification methods for Linear Alkyl Benzene (LAB) production were compared in the experiment.