De-excitations of highly excited $^{11}$B$^*$ and $^{15}$N$^*$ based on the GEMINI++ code

TL;DR

This paper evaluates and improves the GEMINI++ code for modeling nuclear de-excitations of excited boron-11 and nitrogen-15 nuclei, enhancing its accuracy for neutrino detection applications.

Contribution

The authors modify and develop GEMINI++ into GEMINI++4ν, achieving better predictions of nuclear de-excitation processes in light nuclei compared to existing models.

Findings

GEMINI++ initially poorly describes experimental data for $^{11}$B$^*$ and $^{15}$N$^*$.

Modifications to GEMINI++ improve its predictive accuracy.

GEMINI++4ν outperforms other statistical models in matching experimental results.

Abstract

Nuclear de-excitations associated with neutrino-nucleus interactions and nucleon decays are playing an increasingly significant role in neutrino experiments. We explore the GEMINI++ code and estimate its ability to account for the de-excitation processes of highly excited $^{11}$B$^*$ and $^{15}$N$^*$, which can be created in the liquid scintillator and water Cherenkov detectors respectively. It is found that GEMINI++ can not describe the nuclear experimental data of $^{11}$B$^*$ and $^{15}$N$^*$ well. To improve its performance for de-excitations of light nuclei, we modify GEMINI++ and then develop a code of GEMINI++4$\nu$, which can give the best predictions compared with experimental measurements among some widely used statistical model codes.