Speaker
Description
Borexino is a liquid scintillator detector situated underground in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. Its physics program evolves around the study of solar and geo-neutrinos. By now, Borexino has measured neutrinos from the fusion processes in the pp chain and CNO cycle. Especially for the detection of pep and CNO neutrinos, an important background is formed by the cosmogenic radio-isotope $^{11}$C that is produced by muon spallation of $^{12}$C nuclei in the scintillator.
Given the comparatively long life time (30 mins) and high rate (30 cpd and 100 ton), dedicated veto strategies had to be developed to permit the detection of pep and CNO neutrinos. The present contribution presents two veto methods. One is the well-established Three Fold Coincidence (TFC) technique that relies on time and space correlation of muons, spallation neutrons, and radioactive $^{11}$C decays; it has been used in different implementations in all former Borexino analyses. In addition, a newly devised algorithm searching for time-correlated bursts of $^{11}$C events will be presented, highlighting as well the potential gain from a combined application with the TFC technique.
Although both methods have been primarily developed for $^{11}$C tagging in Borexino, they are not limited to this specific experiment or spallation isotope, offering a broad range of potential applications in low-background neutrino experiments.
| Reference to paper (DOI or arXiv) | https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10973 |
|---|
