SPEAKER: Josephine Paton – University of Oxford – TITLE: Directional Neutrino Measurements in Liquid Scintillators

This is a VIRTUAL Event

Location: Sessler Conference Room – 50A-5132

TITLE: Directional Neutrino Measurements in Liquid Scintillators

ABSTRACT:

Neutrinos are one of the most enigmatic particles in the Standard Model. Precise measurements of their properties are vital for our understanding of the subatomic world, and may bring us closer to answering questions such as “Why do neutrinos have mass?” and “Why is the universe matter dominated?”. In order to do this, novel technologies and methodologies are being developed to extract as much information as possible from the interactions of neutrinos on matter.

Liquid scintillators have been utilised in neutrino detectors for decades, benefitting from a high light yield which leads to precise energy reconstruction. However, scintillation light is isotropic, meaning scintillator detectors do not benefit from the directional information used in Cherenkov-based neutrino detectors. Significant investment has been put into developing new methods to extract Cherenkov information from scintillation signals, allowing for a combination of energy precision and directional background rejection. In this talk I outline the methods developed for directional reconstruction in the SNO+ experiment, and present the first demonstration event-by-event directionality of solar neutrinos in a high yield scintillator.