JUNO sensitivity to low energy atmospheric neutrino spectra
Angel Abusleme, Thomas Adam, Shakeel Ahmad, Rizwan Ahmed, Sebastiano Aiello, Muhammad Akram, Fengpeng An, Guangpeng An, Qi An, Giuseppe Andronico, Nikolay Anfimov, Vito Antonelli, Tatiana Antoshkina, Burin Asavapibhop, João Pedro Athayde Marcondes de André, Didier Auguste, Andrej Babic, Wander Baldini, Andrea Barresi, Eric Baussan, Marco Bellato, Antonio Bergnoli, Enrico Bernieri, Thilo Birkenfeld, Sylvie Blin, David Blum, Simon Blyth, Anastasia Bolshakova, Mathieu Bongrand, Clément Bordereau, Dominique Breton, Augusto Brigatti, Riccardo Brugnera, Riccardo Bruno, Antonio Budano, Mario Buscemi, Jose Busto, Ilya Butorov, Anatael Cabrera, Hao Cai, Xiao Cai, Yanke Cai, Zhiyan Cai, Antonio Cammi, Agustin Campeny, Chuanya Cao, Guofu Cao, Jun Cao, Rossella Caruso, Cédric Cerna, Jinfan Chang, Yun Chang, Pingping Chen, Po-An Chen, Shaomin Chen, Xurong Chen, Yi-Wen Chen, Yixue Chen, Yu Chen, Zhang Chen, Jie Cheng, Yaping Cheng, Alexey Chetverikov, Davide Chiesa, Pietro Chimenti, Artem Chukanov, Gérard Claverie, Catia Clementi, Barbara Clerbaux, Selma Conforti Di Lorenzo, Daniele Corti, Salvatore Costa, Flavio Dal Corso, Olivia Dalager, Christophe De La Taille, Jiawei Deng, Zhi Deng, Ziyan Deng, Wilfried Depnering, Marco Diaz, Xuefeng Ding, Yayun Ding, Bayu Dirgantara, Sergey Dmitrievsky, Tadeas Dohnal, Dmitry Dolzhikov, Georgy Donchenko, Jianmeng Dong, Evgeny Doroshkevich, Marcos Dracos, Frédéric Druillole, Shuxian Du, Stefano Dusini, Martin Dvorak, Timo Enqvist, Heike Enzmann, Andrea Fabbri, Lukas Fajt, Donghua Fan, Lei Fan
Abstract
Abstract Atmospheric neutrinos are one of the most relevant natural neutrino sources that can be exploited to infer properties about cosmic rays and neutrino oscillations. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) experiment, a 20 kton liquid scintillator detector with excellent energy resolution is currently under construction in China. JUNO will be able to detect several atmospheric neutrinos per day given the large volume. A study on the JUNO detection and reconstruction capabilities of atmospheric $$\nu _e$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>ν</mml:mi> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> and $$\nu _\mu $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>ν</mml:mi> <mml:mi>μ</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> fluxes is presented in this paper. In this study, a sample of atmospheric neutrino Monte Carlo events has been generated, starting from theoretical models, and then processed by the detector simulation. The excellent timing resolution of the 3” PMT light detection system of JUNO detector and the much higher light yield for scintillation over Cherenkov allow to measure the time structure of the scintillation light with very high precision. Since $$\nu _e$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>ν</mml:mi> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> and $$\nu _\mu $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>ν</mml:mi> <mml:mi>μ</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> interactions produce a slightly different light pattern, the different time evolution of light allows to discriminate the flavor of primary neutrinos. A probabilistic unfolding method has been used, in order to infer the primary neutrino energy spectrum from the detector experimental observables. The simulated spectrum has been reconstructed between 100 MeV and 10 GeV, showing a great potential of the detector in the atmospheric low energy region.