Speaker
Description
HUNT (High-energy Underwater Neutrino Telescope) is a next-generation deep-water observatory proposed by the LHAASO team at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP). Designed for deployment in the deep water of Lake Baikal or the South China Sea, it will cover an instrumented volume of about 30 cubic kilometers, with the goal of detecting high-energy neutrino sources both within and beyond the Milky Way over relatively short observation times. The project has successfully carried out multiple deep-water engineering tests in both locations. Currently, a small-scale prototype array consisting of 7 strings and 56 optical modules is under construction in the South China Sea, which is expected to enable atmospheric neutrino measurements.
A comprehensive simulation framework has been developed for the HUNT experiment. Dedicated event generators for neutrinos and atmospheric muons have been implemented to model signal and background processes. For detector simulation, Geant4 is employed and has been substantially accelerated through the development of two novel libraries: G4ART (Geant4 Accelerated Ray Tracing) for GPU- parallelization optical photon transport and G4DMT (Geant4 Distributed Multi-Threading) for efficient CPU parallelization. This integrated approach achieves a speedup factor exceeding 1000, making high-statistics simulations feasible.
We present a comprehensive simulation workflow for optimizing the HUNT detector geometry. The workflow includes particle injection and propagation in water, Geant4-based detector simulation calibrated with prototype data, trigger emulation, and event reconstruction. Through systematic evaluation, we assess the discovery potential of different detector layouts for multiple neutrino sources. This poster details the simulation framework, reports projected sensitivities for astrophysical neutrino targets, and compares performance across different geometrical configurations.