No Arabic abstract
The Double Chooz neutrino experiment aims to measure the last unknown neutrino mixing angle theta_13 using two identical detectors positioned at sites both near and far from the reactor cores of the Chooz nuclear power plant. To suppress correlated background induced by cosmic muons in the detectors, they are protected by veto detector systems. One of these systems is the inner muon veto. It is an active liquid scintillator based detector and instrumented with encapsulated photomultiplier tubes. In this paper we describe the Monte Carlo aided design process of the inner muon veto, that resulted in a detector configuration with 78 PMTs yielding an efficiency of 99.978 +- 0.004% for rejecting muon events and an efficiency of >98.98% for rejecting correlated events induced by muons. A veto detector of this design is currently used at the far detector site and will be built and incorporated as the muon identification system at the near site of the Double Chooz experiment.
Low background experiments need a suppression of cosmogenically induced events. The GERDA experiment located at LNGS is searching for the neutrinless double beta decay of $^{76}$Ge. It is equipped with an active muon veto the main part of which is a water Cherenkov veto with 66 PMTs in the watertank surrounding the GERDA cryostat. With this system 806 live days have been recorded, 491 days were combined muon-germanium data. A muon detection efficiency of $varepsilon_{mu d}=(99.935pm0.015)$ % was found in a Monte Carlo simulation for the muons depositing energy in the germanium detectors. By examining coincident muon-germanium events a rejection efficiency of $varepsilon_{mu r}=(99.2_{-0.4}^{+0.3})$ % was found. Without veto condition the muons by themselves would cause a background index of $textrm{BI}_{mu}=(3.16 pm 0.85)times10^{-3}$ cts/(keV$cdot$kg$cdot$yr) at $Q_{betabeta}$.
We present the results of afterpulse measurements performed as qualification test for 473 inner detector photomultipliers of the Double Chooz experiment. The measurements include the determination of a total afterpulse occurrence probability as well as an average time distribution of these pulses. Additionally, more detailed measurements with different light sources and simultaneous charge and timing measurements were performed with a few photomultipliers to allow a more detailed understanding of the effect. The results of all measurements are presented and discussed.
We describe a muon track reconstruction algorithm for the reactor anti-neutrino experiment Double Chooz. The Double Chooz detector consists of two optically isolated volumes of liquid scintillator viewed by PMTs, and an Outer Veto above these made of crossed scintillator strips. Muons are reconstructed by their Outer Veto hit positions along with timing information from the other two detector volumes. All muons are fit under the hypothesis that they are through-going and ultrarelativistic. If the energy depositions suggest that the muon may have stopped, the reconstruction fits also for this hypothesis and chooses between the two via the relative goodness-of-fit. In the ideal case of a through-going muon intersecting the center of the detector, the resolution is ~40 mm in each transverse dimension. High quality muon reconstruction is an important tool for reducing the impact of the cosmogenic isotope background in Double Chooz.
The Double Chooz experiment measures the neutrino mixing angle $theta_{13}$ by detecting reactor $bar{ u}_e$ via inverse beta decay. The positron-neutron space and time coincidence allows for a sizable background rejection, nonetheless liquid scintillator detectors would profit from a positron/electron discrimination, if feasible in large detector, to suppress the remaining background. Standard particle identification, based on particle dependent time profile of photon emission in liquid scintillator, can not be used given the identical mass of the two particles. However, the positron annihilation is sometimes delayed by the ortho-positronium (o-Ps) metastable state formation, which induces a pulse shape distortion that could be used for positron identification. In this paper we report on the first observation of positronium formation in a large liquid scintillator detector based on pulse shape analysis of single events. The o-Ps formation fraction and its lifetime were measured, finding the values of 44$%$ $pm$ 12$%$ (sys.) $pm$ 5$%$ (stat.) and $3.68$ns $pm$ 0.17ns (sys.) $pm$ 0.15ns (stat.) respectively, in agreement with the results obtained with a dedicated positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy setup.
Modern precision neutrino experiments like Double Chooz require a highly efficient trigger system in order to reduce systematic uncertainties. The trigger and timing system of the Double Chooz experiment was designed according to this goal. The Double Chooz trigger system is driven by the basic idea of triggering on multiple thresholds according to the total visible energy and additionally triggering on the number of active photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) in the detector. To do so, the trigger system continuously monitors the analogue signals from all PMTs in the detector. The amplitudes of these PMT-signals are summed for groups of certain PMTs (group signals) and for all PMTs (sum signal), respectively. The group signals are discriminated by two thresholds for each input channel and four thresholds for the sum signal. The resulting signals are processed by the trigger logic unit which is implemented in a FPGA. In addition to the proper trigger, the trigger system provides a common clock signal for all subsequent data acquisition systems to guarantee a synchronous readout of the Double Chooz detectors. The present design of the system provides a high flexibility for the applied logic and settings, making it useful for experiments other than Double Chooz. The Double Chooz trigger and timing system was installed and commissioned in 2011. This article describes the hardware of the trigger and timing system. Furthermore the setup, implemented trigger logic and performance of the trigger and timing system for the Double Chooz experiment is presented.