Slow-Fluor Scintillator for Low Energy Solar Neutrinos and Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of slow-fluor liquid scintillators for detecting low energy solar neutrinos and neutrinoless double beta decay, demonstrating improved directional reconstruction and background rejection capabilities through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel slow-fluor scintillator model that enhances directional detection and background suppression for neutrino and double beta decay experiments.

Findings

Enhanced directional reconstruction for low energy neutrinos.

Potential to measure CNO solar neutrino flux with <10% uncertainty.

Background rejection for neutrinoless double beta decay could improve by a factor of 10.

Abstract

The potential for using slow-fluor liquid scintillators to study low energy solar neutrinos and neutrinoless double beta decay (0nbb) is explored through a series of simulations. The fluorescence model assumed for the primary fluor has characteristics similar to acenaphthene, recently used to demonstrate Cherenkov separation at energies around 1 MeV. Results here indicate notably better directional reconstruction in large-scale detectors than has previously been suggested by other approaches, allowing better identification of low energy solar neutrinos. These studies indicate that a detector with as little as ~30% coverage using currently available photomultiplier tubes could be able to make a measurement of the CNO solar neutrino flux to a precision of better than 10% (enough to distinguish metallicity models) with a few kiloton-years of exposure. In terms of 0nbb studies here suggest that the ability to separate mechanisms based on angular distributions is weak, but that the rejection of solar neutrino backgrounds with such a technique might potentially approach a factor of 10 for endpoint energies near 2.5 MeV in the angular hemisphere defined by the solar direction.