Speaker
Description
The SNO+ experiment is a kilotonne-scale liquid scintillator (LS) neutrino detector located 2 km underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. The 780 tonnes of LS is housed inside of a 12 m diameter acrylic vessel (AV). Surrounding the AV is a 17 m diameter array of 9362 inward-looking photo-multiplier tubes which detect scintillation light produced by particle interactions in the LS. Within its broad physics program, SNO+ detects anti-neutrinos through an inverse beta decay (IBD) reaction, producing a characteristic coincidence signal that can be easily separated from most backgrounds. This allows SNO+ to make two key measurements: the determination of a subset of neutrino mixing parameters from reactor anti-neutrino oscillations, and the flux of geo-neutrinos emitted from the decay of unstable elements in the Earth. The SNO+ collaboration has recently released improved measurements for both.
An important component of the improved anti-neutrino analysis was the use of a deployed $^{241}$Am-$^{9}$Be neutron calibration source, which produces a coincidence signal similar to that of IBD reactions. Validation of the detector response to these events enabled, for the first time, the use of a novel timing-based event classifier to distinguish IBD events from a class of background delayed-coincidence events produced by $(\alpha,n)$ interactions. This talk will summarize the SNO+ AmBe calibration campaign and analysis of the calibration data.
| Keyword-1 | Calibration |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | Neutrinos |