A way to measure the water quality of the LHAASO-WCDA with cosmic muon signals

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to measure water quality in the LHAASO-WCDA using cosmic muon signals, demonstrating high precision in water transparency monitoring crucial for the detector's operation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel technique utilizing cosmic muon signals to assess water transparency, aiding long-term stability of large water Cherenkov detectors.

Findings

Achieved several percent precision in attenuation length measurement.

Validated the method with a 9-cell detector array at Tibet.

Method suitable for large-scale water Cherenkov detector monitoring.

Abstract

The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) is to be built at Daocheng, Sichuan Province, China. As one of the major components of the LHAASO project, a Water Cherenkov Detector Array (WCDA), with an area of 78,000~$\rm m^{2}$, contains 350,000~tons of purified water. The water transparency and its stability are critical for successful long-term operation of this project. To gain full knowledge of the water Cherenkov technique and investigate the engineering issues, a 9-cell detector array has been built at the Yangbajing site, Tibet, China. With the help of the distribution of single cosmic muon signals, the monitoring and measurement of water transparency are studied. The results show that a precision of several percent can be obtained for the attenuation length measurement, which satisfies the requirements of the experiment. In the near future, this method could be applied to the LHAASO-WCDA project.