Liquid-organic time projection chamber for detecting low energy antineutrinos

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of a liquid-organic time projection chamber to detect low-energy antineutrinos, offering detailed particle tracking and direction reconstruction to improve background discrimination and neutrino property measurements.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive simulation study demonstrating the feasibility of using a liquid-organic TPC for antineutrino detection with full event reconstruction capabilities.

Findings

Positron tracks can identify the neutrino interaction vertex.

Neutron-induced proton recoils can help determine the antineutrino direction.

Simulation results suggest promising potential for this detection method.

Abstract

The MeV region of antineutrino energy is of special interest for physics research and for monitoring nuclear nonproliferation. Whereas liquid scintillation detectors are typically used to detect the Inverse Beta Decay (IBD), it has recently been proposed to detect it with a liquid-organic Time Projection Chamber, which could allow a full reconstruction of the particle tracks of the IBD final state. We present the first comprehensive simulation-based study of the expected signatures. Their unequivocal signature could enable a background-minimized detection of electron antineutrinos using information on energy, location and direction of all final state particles. We show that the positron track reflects the antineutrino's vertex. It can also be used to determine the initial neutrino energy. In addition, we investigate the possibility to reconstruct the antineutrino direction on an event-by-event basis by the energy deposition of the neutron-induced proton recoils. Our simulations indicate that this could be a promising approach which should be further studied through experiments with a detector prototype.