Speaker
Description
The Eos team is proposing to make the first measurement of the electron-neutrino charged-current cross section on $^{16}$O in the tens of MeV energy range using pion decay-at-rest neutrinos produced by the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The 4-tonne fiducial optical detector is currently taking data at the University of California, Berkeley to demonstrate the performance capabilities of scintillation-based “hybrid” detector technologies for future neutrino detectors, such as water-based liquid scintillator and dichroicons. It is instrumented with 204 Hamamatsu R14688-100 photomultiplier tubes, providing excellent single photoelectron timing resolution (< 1 ns FWHM) and high quantum efficiencies (> 25% at 400 nm). These capabilities enable the precise energy and direction reconstruction of final state electrons, as well as the rejection of background elastic scattering and cosmic ray events. At 20 m from the SNS target, Eos would be exposed to an intense neutrino flux on the order of $10^7$cm$^{−2}$s$^{−1}$. A measurement of neutrino-oxygen cross sections in this previously unexplored energy range will build upon existing results at higher energies, and provide crucial information for studying supernovae neutrinos in large water Cherenkov detectors such as Super-Kamiokande and Hyper-Kamiokande.